Create iPhone Apps from Scratch with iOS7 – Starter Course

Welcome to our beginner iPhone development class, where we want to help you make your first iPhone app today.

Here we will go over what you will get out of this course, and how you can make your way through it.

Materials

• Mac (2008+) or MacInCloud.com
• Xcode 5+ and Mountain Lion (10.8+)
• Notebook

Goals

• Read/Write Code
• Utility iPhone Apps
• Sketch Ideas

Practice

• Schedule 1-2 hours/day (7-14 hours/week)
• Coding: 30-60 minutes/day
• Reading/Watching: 30-60 minutes/day
• Track Progress

Create your first iPhone app and run it on the simulator.

Here you will see how yo make a simple calculator app for iOS. Create a new project in Xcode, design a simple UI and make it work.

Follow along to build a working app that with do the math for us when brewing Artisan Coffee.

P.S. Interested in Artisan Coffee brewing? See my post at http://iphonedev.tv/blog/2013/2/6/artistan-coffee-brewing-learn-to-make-excellent-coffee-at-home-or-work

We all run into bugs when coding, especially when we are learning new techniques. Here you will learn the basics of debugging.

Turn on line numbers in Xcode, see some common bugs, and learn how to squash them with Xcode’s recommendations.

Learn how to rename variables, fix broken connections to your UI, comment out lines of code, and read the debugger output.

Variables are how we store information in our apps. We use them to ask the computer to remember a date, or a number, or other information. In code, we give this data a name so we can remember it too.

Learn about the common kinds of data or types, how to create them with names or aliases, and assign an expression to this variable.

Some basic types:

- short/int/long: -1,0,1

- float/double: 3.14

- char: ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’

- pointers: int *(store addresses)

- struct: (x,y)

Jump into Xcode and make simple mac to learn how variables work in code.

See how to use NSLog to print out your variable as a means to checking its value. This practice will become very useful to test your apps behavior as you develop.

Create the common variable types, perform operations on them, and see how they behave.

We need to teach our apps how to make choices. If it is rainy out, we need to bring an umbrella.

This lecture will go over logical decision making. We will cover if, else and else if statements so we can make these logic based decisions. Learn the syntax needed to implement the choices your app will need.

We will cover a new type called BOOL, boolean operators like less than or equal to, and the logical operators AND, OR, and NOT.

Create an iPhone app on the storyboard to see how decision making works in practice. design a user interface with labels and buttons. Change label text in your app when your defined conditions are met.

Practice making working iPhone apps in Xcode. Follow along to practice making and modifying variables, implementing if statements, and working with the BOOL type and logical operators.

Learning how to implement decisions is a crucial part of app development. This video will show you how to work with decision making in iPhone Apps.

Functions are the building blocks for how we get our apps to behave how we want them to. You can think of functions like the directions that come with IKEA furniture. They show you how to take all of the parts and put them together in order to build you piece of furniture.

If you had another set of the parts, you could use them again and again. Functions are the same way in that we can use the same code many times without have to rewrite it.

Learn about how functions can save you lines of code, and how their implementation works in memory with the stack frame.

Writing functions saves you time and lines of code because you can use them over and over. See how to implement functions that take variables as input.

Learn how to use break points to see how your app is working under the hood. This will also allow us to see how the stack frame, local, and global variables work in our computer.

Here we write a simple function to calculate area of a rectangle given the length of its two sides.

Since functions allow us to reuse code, we can develop special functions that call themselves to repeat a process until a specified condition. We call these recursive functions.

We need to be careful with this type of function, as they can lead to bug causing our apps to crash if they never terminate.

Recursion is a great way to understand the stack frame, so we use a rocket launch countdown function to illustrate how this works.

Here we implement the recursive function we saw in the lecture to act as a count down timer. Follow along to get practice writing functions and implementing decision making in our apps. You will also learn a new function called sleep, which forces the computer to wait for some number of second. This is useful in watching what your app is outputting with enough time to read the print statements.

We again utilize break points to debug and see what is happening as the code is evaluated line by line. This will show how the stack frames are pop’d off as the code completes.

Global variables are variables that can be reused between functions. Global variables are very useful in C programing, and since Objective-C is built on top of this, you will have access to their functionality. Note that it is not recommended to use these in you code, however, others may have, so this will teach you how to work with them if you need to.

Follow along to get practice writing functions with global variables. Also see the difference between global and local variables and how they are handled within the scope of your functions. We then go over creating a new code file and using the static keyword to avoid conflicts amongst global variables in separate files.

Numbers are a fundamental building block of apps. We will use them to store user data, control the components in our apps, and perform calculations.

Here we introduce the types of integers and floating-point numbers we will commonly use. We cover how they work with the NSLog function, and how we can gain access to the built in math libraries so you don’t have to write code for basic functions like sine, cosine, etc.

Common Versions of Integers:

char

short

int

long

long long

Common Versions of Floating-point Numbers:

float

double

Numbers are a fundamental building block of apps. We will use them to store user data, control the components in our apps, and perform calculations.

Follow along to work with the common types of numbers and see how your apps will handle them. See how overflow errors can cause strange behavior, a good reason to choose the proper number type. We will also go over the orders of operation so you know where to put your parenthesis in your calculations.

Additionally we will cover special operators such as the increment and decrement operators that will save you lines of code.

Loops allow us to repeat actions multiple times. We use loops in when downloading an album of pictures from the web, when we are editing photos, or even when you are making a game and checking if a player has won yet.

Here we cover the structure of basic loops, the while and for loops. We also go into the functionality of the keywords break and continue that end the loop early or skip a particular iteration, respectively. This background will show you how to create the behavior you are looking for in a loop.

Loops allow us to repeat actions multiple times. We use loops in when downloading an album of pictures from the web, when we are editing photos, or even when you are making a game and checking if a player has won yet.

Follow along as we use a loop to reproduce the behavior we had in the countdown clock without having to use the recursive function call. Next we cover the for loop and use the debugger to see exactly what the computer is doing as it runs through our code. Lastly we add a continue call to the code so we can see its behavior with the debugger.