Damian Galarza ▮

Getting Started with iOS Development

Around April I started digging into iOS and Swift. I figured it would be helpful to share my experience with others who may also want to learn it. Note, this comes from the perspective of someone who already has a programming background and previously spent time becoming familiar with Objective-C and Apple’s Cocoa Touch frameworks.

When I first got started, I decided to search for some online iOS with Swift courses. I was hoping to find some courses on Code School or something similar. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a course like this. The courses that I found were focused around learning iOS with Objective-C. I decided if I was going to start learning iOS, I wanted to learn it with the modern Swift language rather than Objective-C.

That’s not to say that having Objective-C knowledge isn’t valuable. It’s especially important to have Objective-C experience to work with older applications. For example, Tropos is built with Objective-C. In order to contribute to this project, I needed to think back to my Objective-C learnings. The specifics around iOS development tend to be the frameworks that Apple provides to its developers. These frameworks have great documentation and are in both, Swift and Objective-C. If you’re learning how to use these libraries and the concepts behind iOS, it shouldn’t be difficult to apply them to Objective-C.

Initially I was disappointed to see that there weren’t many resources to get started in iOS from a beginner’s perspective with Swift. Then after spending some more time searching I found that Stanford University has a free course on iTunes university titled Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift. This has been an immensely useful resource. Paul Hegarty is a great instructor. He is really good at explaining the concepts and demonstrating things in real time. I highly recommend checking it out.

These are a few of the important things I’ve learned so far:

  • Read the iOS Human Interface Guidelines This may go without saying but Apple has done a ton of research behind the user experience of iOS and its native applications. A fun fact that I learned was the loading screen for an iOS application shouldn’t be used as a splash page. Instead, it should be a representation of the inactive application to give the illusion of a quick load.

  • Have a project idea While reading and following the Stanford online course was immensely useful to start learning, I always feel that I need a concrete project to work on to apply my learnings. Without this, I usually can’t keep sustained interest. I recommend coming up with a simple app idea to work on while learning.

  • Read through Apple’s developer documentation While developing for iOS you have a large number of frameworks provided by Apple at your disposal. Apple also provides excellent documentation around all of these frameworks; XCode even has a documentation browser built in. I recommend taking the time to familiarize yourself with these documents and learn to navigate them, it will be a huge benefit in the long run.

  • Use the Apple developer forums I wasn’t immediately aware of how useful the Apple developer forums would be. I was running into trouble getting an archive of my app sent to iTunes connect and spent hours if not days searching for support. Most of my searching turned up various StackOverflow posts which were not helpful, but after checking in the thoughtbot XCode slack channel I found that someone else had recently run into a similar issue. They lead me to the specific post on the Apple developer forums regarding the issue and I was able to work around it in a few minutes. Lesson I learned; search the Apple developer forums.

Design Resources

June 12, 2015 ∙ swift