How to start iOS development?

OPENING

I understand if you confuse where to start to learn the iOS development, just like me. I don’t say this is easy but I don’t wanna say it’s hard either because I know how it feels to be the beginner programmer.

Before you continue, please understand that this is just my version of how to start the iOS development and I believe there will some flaws. But if this helps you, why not to try?

THE STEPS

Without any further do let’s start from the point number one :

Prepare your weapons!

No, it’s not a war. Weapon means the device you use to develop the iOS program such as Macbook, iPhone device (it’s optional, you can use ios simulator instead) & your willingness hehe.

Collect & Read some references related to iOS development

Yep, I started to learn iOS development by reading some references from the website like raywenderlich.com, medium.com, udemy, stackoverflow (the most common thing that developers should know :v), etc.

Here’s the example of what I read when I started learn iOS development → https://www.raywenderlich.com/6338-swift-tutorial-part-1-expressions-variables-and-constants

It explains the very basic things in iOS development by using Playground.

Start create a simple project

Don’t just read, implement it!

You can start by create a very simple project like showing a Hello World text, and then playing with the text properties in the xib files (change color, background color, text style, etc)

I will create a new story about how to create a simple project for the more specific version soon.

Learn the lifecycle of iOS Application

It’s very important to know, because the application lifecycle will helps us to understand the app behaviour.

For example, there is a method named applicationDidEnterBackground which is called when the app enters the background state. In that method we can implement something to handle anything we need based on our app requirement.

Get to know about navigation in iOS

Mostly, all the apps need this thing. Yes! it’s the navigation. It’s the condition if you have more than one page and you need to move from current page to another page.

In iOS, there are three styles of navigation such hierarchical navigation, flat navigation & content driven navigation. Please refer to this link for more details https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/app-architecture/navigation/. In the implementation you will use present or push code. Please wait for the specific article about this ya.

Try create a view that show list of data

In this step, you will learn to use the UITableView or UICollectionView. Contact list is one of the example of UITableView implementation.

How about the UICollectionView? Usually it used on the customized view like grid view or the carousel view and for the nearest example is your gallery/photos page.

The component if this view is cell, if it’s using UITableView then use UITableViewCell and if it’s using UICollectionView then use UICollectionViewCell. Those views usually called the reusable view, because we use the same view for different element of data.

For more information about this step, I will make the simple tutorial soon. :)

CLOSING

That’s how I start learn how to understand the iOS development and I hope this article may helps you too.

There will be another article related to the steps above for more details. Please do not hesitate if you have any concern with this article or just leave a clap if you feel this helpful.

Thank you!