iOS Apprentice

This section tells you a few things you need to know before you get started, such as what you’ll need for hardware and software, where to find the project files for this book, and more.

In this section, you’ll learn about UIKit, which is the way to build the UI of your app. UIKit has been around since the first iOS and is currently powering all of the existing iOS apps in the App Store.

You’ll start by creating a basic view to understand how UIKit works, how it places UI elements on the screen and how to interact with them. You’ll also read about the most common design pattern used when building apps using UIKit. You’ll then go on to create Bullseye!

This section builds upon what you learnt in the previous section by introducing you to your second app. Checklists takes you from a single-screen app to a multi-screen app where you learn the concepts of navigation flow, displaying data lists, and the idea of modelling and persisting your data.

If you want to build any sort of list-based iOS app, this section is a good starting point for learning the basics. Of course, even if you aren’t building a list-based app, this section has some basic concepts such as handling the navigation flow from one screen to another (and back again) that would be very useful to an apprentice iOS developer.

With this third section and the MyLocations app, you get into Swift programming in earnest.

Sure you’ve already done coding in the previous sections, but this section starts with a good review of all the Swift coding principles you’ve learned so far and added to it by introducing some new concepts, too. In addition to that, you learn about using GPS coordinates, displaying data on maps, and using the iOS image picker to take photos using your camera or to pick existing images from your photo album. There’s a lot of valuable general information on Swift development as well as specific information about building location-aware apps.

This section of the book covers iPad support in more detail via the Store Search app.

Store Search shows you how to have separate custom screens both for specific orientations (landscape vs. portrait) as well as for specific platforms (iPhone vs. iPad). This section covers networking, working with remote API endpoints to fetch data needed by your app, and how to parse the fetched data. If that wasn’t enough, this section also takes you through the full application life cycle — from developing the code, testing it, and all the way to submitting to Apple. So don’t skip this section thinking that you know all about iOS development after the last few sections!

This section introduces you to the first of the two apps you’ll build throughout this book using SwiftUI: Bullseye. It’s a simple game that challenges the user to move a slider to a specific position without any hints or markers. While it won’t make you an App Store millionaire, the exercise of writing it will introduce you to the basics of writing iOS apps.

Finally, you’ll get your first taste of something that even the most experienced iOS developers haven’t had much time to try: SwiftUI. It’s the new way to build user interfaces for Apple platforms, and like the programming language from which it takes its name, it’s simple and powerful. The first two apps that you’ll make in this book will give you a great head start in building interfaces with SwiftUI.

This section aims to be beginner-friendly, and you may be tempted to skip it. Please don’t, especially if you’re new to iOS development. You’ll need the fundamentals introduced in this section for later parts of the book, and you’ll miss out on the basics of the all-new SwiftUI.

In this section, you’ll build Checklists. As you may have gathered from the name, it’s a TODO app that lets the user create, manage, and track items in one or more lists. Lists are a key part of many apps, and the lessons you’ll learn while building Checklists will serve you well when you start coding your creations.

This is the second iOS app you will build using Apple’s brand new UI framework SwiftUI.