Tuesday, 22 November 2022

IOS APP DEVELOPMENT OR HOW TO LOVE APPLE EVEN MORE


The application and its updates, before being published in the App Store, must go through strict moderation.

iOS mobile apps published in the store are updated once a month.

Every self-respecting iOS developer feels the need to create the highest quality application with a beautiful design, well-designed user interface and maximum performance.

According to statistics, the price of iOS developer services varies from 60,000 to 250,000 rubles. The relevance of the application development market for the iOS mobile operating system is undeniable.

In this article, we will set a goal to create an iOS application that will display the message “Hello World” on the main screen without even writing a line of code. This will get you familiar with the basics of iOS development before writing code.

Let’s see what we need to create an application of the most primitive sample:

Mac OS X device

Downloaded Xcode.

Arms.

As you can see, we don’t need a head. Yes, Apple has made every effort to simplify work, eliminate elementary possible problems and shorten the process of developing mobile applications for their platforms, such as: iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, macOS, watchOS. Apple also introduced the Swift programming language in 2014, which is very easy for beginners and functional for professionals with experience in iOS mobile development. If you can create a program for one platform, for example for iOS, then you do not need to learn additional programming skills to create a mobile application for other technologies from Apple. Everything is unified to such an extent that you can use almost the same code, running it on different types of Apple devices.

Learn more about the Swift language.

Go!

CREATING A PROJECT

So, as mentioned earlier, we need an Apple computer (or Hakintosh – a Windows device, but with MacOS installed or a virtual machine with MacOS), and the Xcode IDE, which is freely available in the App Store (free).

Let’s see what Xcode is and why we need it.

The Xcode software development environment is a service that includes: a code editor, a GUI editor, a version control system, and tools for debugging and displaying programs we have written. In short, this is a program that allows you to solve 90% of all tasks in the development of applications for the family of operating systems from Apple.

You can download Xcode from the link – developer.apple.com/xcode.

So, starting Xcode, we see a welcome window where there is an opportunity to open, create or clone a project. We need to create a new one by clicking on “Create a new Xcode project”. Yes, the entire Xcode interface is only available in English, so I advise you to stock up on an English dictionary.

Creating a new project in the Xcode development environment

The next step we see this window:

Creating an Application in the Xcode Designer

Here we are offered to choose the platform and type of application. We need software to create an iOS program (at the top of the dialog box) and a Single View App. It all starts with Single View and then grows to 50 View App.

The next step is to enter the name of the project, the organization in which we want to make the iOS application, select the language and enable / disable additional features.

Settings window for creating a new project in the Xcode development environment

LET’S GO IN ORDER:

Product Name – application name;

Team – development team. Set to None. We will need this field at the stage of laying out and testing in order to certify the program with an iOS developer account;

Organization Name – the name of the organization that owns the rights to the source code of the application. The name of the organization and some other parameters will be highlighted in the header in each file;

The window for creating a new project in the Xcode development environment

Organization Identifier – organization identifier. As a rule, this is the reverse domain of the official site. If the company is called example and its Internet address is example.ru, then its identifier will be equal to ru.example;

Bundle Identifier – bundle identifier. A unique ID that will be used when placing the product in the App Store and will appear when signing the program;

Language – programming language. We have two options: Objective-C and the Swift language. The first one is considered a little outdated, as a rule, new projects are no longer written on it, but old ones are supported, and since we are creating a new one, we choose the Swift language. I note that for our tasks it will not be necessary to write code;

Use Core Data is a parameter that will add a database to our project. It is usually used for large amounts of data. As part of our work today, we do not mean that we will store any data at all, so we disable this option;

Include Unit Tests (unit tests) – automated code testing. Its execution helps to see errors that may occur during changes in the latest version of the finished digital product. But since we basically won’t have a code, we need to disable this option;

Include UI Tests – automated user interface testing. We disable this option, since we will have only one interface element for the user, and it cannot be tested;

After filling in the information, click Next, and select the location of the project on our computer, click Create.

OVERVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

We have our main workspace open and let’s see what we have here. Because the interface is quite complex, we will divide it into several parts: top, left, right, bottom and middle.