Creating iOS Apps – Develop and Design, 2nd Edition

Book Preface

This book serves two goals: introducing new developers to iOS development and educating experienced developers about the changes in iOS 7. We will examine a wide range of subjects—some new and some old—covering everything from building an initial iOS project to submitting your app to the iTunes App Store. For more information, including bonus chapters, sample code, and FAQs, check out www.freelancemadscience.com/books.

iOS 7 Technolo gies and Tool s
Over the course of this book, we will discuss the key technologies and development tools you will need to create high-quality iOS applications. Let’s take a look at the most important of these. Storyboards Storyboards allow us to rapidly design the relationships and segues between different scenes in our application. This lets us sketch out and edit our entire application’s workflow very early in the design process. We can also show the storyboard to our clients, getting approval and feedback before we invest a significant amount of time in writing code.

Auto Layout
Creating a user interface that can automatically adapt to changes in size has become increasingly important. Whether you’re responding to rotation events, trying to design an interface that works on both 3.5- and 4-inch phones or adjusting the user interface because of changes from Dynamic Type, Auto Layout makes creating truly adaptive interfaces possible. Furthermore, iOS 7 and Xcode 5 offer significantly better support for Auto Layout. If you haven’t tried Auto Layout lately, you should look at it again.

Animation
While visually stunning animations have always been part of the iOS experience, iOS 7’s new user interface places a much greater emphasis on attractive, functional animations. The new, “flatter” look de-emphasizes visual ornamentation but replaces it with custom transitions and interactive animations. Furthermore, new technologies like UIMotionEffects and UIKit Dynamics help give our applications depth.