iOS Preparation & Design. Beginning with easy steps

What is the Course About?

The Version of XCode shown is now outdated.

However, the Principals remain the same..

If you are beginning to develop iOS apps, then before you begin actual coding, you need to think about design, and project layout. This course is about Preparation and Design. The things you need to think about before you begin even one line of code. It doesn't matter whether you are programming in Swift, or in C - You still need clear design layout, and the right images. 

By the time you finish this course, you will have a clear understanding of what's needed to lay out your workspace, and images, to best effect.

There are many images involved in building an app, either in Swift, or in C, and you should get into good programming habits early. This course will give you a good insight into how to do this. You may think that you just sit down and start writing a program - and of course you can do this. However, when you notice that all of your apps have no icons on the home screen, and al lof your backgrounds are plain white or black - you suddenly think to yourself - wow, how do I create and position the images I need?

Lets look at the average iPhone app - not to mention AppleTV apps, iPad apps, and Apple Watch apps - and all of them come in various sizes.

iPhone apps need App Icons. The little images that sit on the home screen, and in the Spotlight search, and on the App Store, and on the Apple App store lookup screen

The iPhone also needs Launch images, and there are two ways of setting this up, each requiring multiple images to take care of different size apps. Because you have no idea in the end, which device a user may have?

Terminology you will get used to.

iPhone development, iPad development, XCode, Apple App Store, AppleTV and Watch. Swift development, C++ development, Photoshop and Gimp, for png type file development and of course developing on the Apple Mac, using it's OSX operating system

Materials included in the course.

Included in the course when you have reached the last tutorial or lesson, will be the complete working Xcode project source code for the app Witch Hunt, just as it runs on the App Store.

How long will the course take to complete?

If you are already familiar with the Apple Computer you can most likely complete the course in a day. That is, if you just sit and watch of course you can get through it in about half an hour. However, if you work on your own project such as a vanilla "Hello World" while you are going through each lesson, and creating the images you need, as I recommend you do, then the course should take you a day at most. That's about six hours of six straight hours. I don't recommend that you do that. It's much better to take your time and become familiar with each step. Remember, there are no actual How-To-Code lessons in this course, it's purely about setting up the project work space, and preparing your images in advance.

How is the course structured?

The structure is simple in this introductory development course. It consists of a number of video tutorials - six in fact, that you can view, and follow the steps outlined within each lesson. Each lesson takes you closer to actual development of an app, and if you want to be bold, you can easily start with the "Hello World" app that is used in the lessons.

Why take the course?

If you plan on developing iPhone app as a potential income stream, then you need to develop good project planning habits right from the start. It will save you hours and hours in the end, and reduce or even remove wasted time as you have to keep going back to do things like create that App Store Image that you should have done right at the beginning. The other main reason is neatness. Creating an App using XCode creates a multitude of littel files and directories that the project uses itself. You can quickly lose all the files if you don't have them under one folder, and have that folder backed up.

Thank you for looking at this course.

Robert Chalmers. 
Your Instructor.