Kevin Mcneish

Author Details

Kevin McNeish's picture

Author Details

Kevin McNeish

Kevin McNeish is author of the new book “Learn to Code in Swift” as well as the “iOS App Development for Non-Programmers” book series (www.iOSAppsForNonProgrammers.com), winner of the Publishing Innovation Award. Kevin is also an award-winning app developer, software architect, and conference speaker in the U.S. and abroad. He has spent much of his career making difficult concepts easy to understand. Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kjmcneish.

Earlier this year I was invited to meet with members of Apple's iBooks Store (formerly called the iBookstore) at the Book Expo America conference in New York City. At that meeting I talked about my major complaint with iBooks—you couldn't read them on a Mac. You could only read them on the iPad. This gave the appearance that Apple was more interested in selling iPads than in supporting the iBooks ecosystem. So I was delighted when Tim Cook announced at the special event in September 2013 that Apple was making a version of iBooks for Mavericks, the new operating system for the Mac! This is a huge win for readers. Now you can read your books on the larger Mac screens (there is even a full screen mode) and iCloud keeps your current page, highlights, notes, bookmarks, and collections up to date on all devices. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is part 28 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

Just about every app has the need to store and retrieve settings that are specific to the user. User settings include information such as name, ID, email address, password, high score (for games), preferences, and so on. 

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience  how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 27 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In many of the built-in iOS apps, such as Settings, you are able to edit information directly in the cells of a table view. This is a nice feature, because you the user doesn't have to navigate to a separate scene just to enter a value. This is especially important when setting up email where there are several values that need to be entered.

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 26 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous post we went through the steps of converting the Write Review scene in iAppsReview to iOS 7 and Xcode 5. In this post we're going to update a few more scenes and learn even more important information about Auto Layout, iOS 7's default edge-to-edge content, and how to specify a global tint for your app!

Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the non-programmer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure, and you will experience how much fun turning your ideas into reality can be! This is Part 24 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.

In my previous column, I talked about some of the great new changes in Xcode 5, Apple's tool for creating iOS apps. In this post, I am going to move the iAppsReview project to Xcode 5 and iOS 7 and we'll talk about some of the challenges you will encounter as you move your apps forward. 

I installed iOS 7 beta 3 on my iPhone 4S a few days ago and have had some time to check it out and the results are in—my iPhone works again!

For those of you who installed beta 2 on your iOS devices, you know what I'm talking about. With beta 2, I couldn't take a picture without shutting down and restarting my iPhone. I often had to tap the surface several times before my tap was recognized, and a few times each day, my iPhone would simply reboot itself.

This is par for the course for an early beta of any software, especially an operating system. However, I wanted to install the early betas of iOS 7 on the devices I use on a daily basis because it's the best way to become intimately acquainted with this revamped version of iOS.

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