iOS 10 SDK Development: Creating iPhone and iPad Apps with Swift

293 Pages·2017·7.82 MB·English

by  Chris Adamson

iOS 10 SDK Development
Creating iPhone and iPad Apps with Swift
by Chris Adamson, with Janie Clayton
Version: P1.0 (March 2017)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
About This Edition
So Here’s the Plan
Expectations and Technical Requirements
Online Resources
And Here We Go
1. Playing with Xcode 8
Tooling Up with Xcode
Messing Around in a Playground
Getting Serious on the Playground
Digging into Documentation
What We’ve Learned
2. Starting with Swift
The Swift Programming Language
Using Variables and Constants
Counting with Numeric Types
Storing Text in Strings
Packaging Data in Collections
Looping and Branching: Control Flow
Maybe It’s There, Maybe It Isn’t: Optionals
What We’ve Learned
3. Swift with Style
Creating Classes
Returning Tuples
Building Lightweight Structures
Listing Possibilities with Enumerations
Handling Errors the Swift Way
What We’ve Learned
4. Building User Interfaces
Creating Our First Project
The Xcode Window
Building Our User Interface
Placing UI Elements with Auto Layout
Adding Images to the UI
What We’ve Learned
5. Connecting the UI to Code
Connecting Actions
Coding the Action
Connecting Outlets
What We’ve Learned
6. Testing the App
The Need for Unit Tests
How Tests Work in Xcode
Creating Tests
Testing Asynchronously
User Interface Testing
Running and Testing on the Device
What We’ve Learned
7. Handling Asynchronicity with Closures
Understanding Closures
Coding with Closures
Care and Feeding of Closures
Grand Central Dispatch
What We’ve Learned
8. Loading and Parsing Network Data
Fetching Network Data
Mapping XML to Swift Types
Parsing XML
Combining XML Parsers
What We’ve Learned
9. Presenting Data with Tables
Tables on iOS
Creating Table Views
Customizing Table Appearance
What We’ve Learned
10. Navigating Through Scenes
Navigation Controllers
Segueing Between Scenes
Modal Segues
What We’ve Learned
11. Fixing the App When It Breaks
Logging Messages
Taking Control with Breakpoints
Setting Up Your Debugging Environment
What We’ve Learned
12. Publishing and Maintaining the App
Getting with the Program
Preparing the App for Submission
Uploading the App
Testing with TestFlight
Publishing and Beyond
What We’ve Learned
13. Taking the Next Step
User Interface
Data Management
Interacting with Other Apps
Media, Graphics, and Gaming
Real-World Interaction
The Low-Level Frameworks
What We’ve Learned
Bibliography
Copyright © 2017, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Acknowledgements

Ten versions of iOS (neé iPhone OS), and we’ve now managed to get Prags books out for half of
them: 3, 6, 8, 9, and 10—more than half, if you recall there was no App Store or public SDK for
version 1. Now that these releases have become an annual thing, we might finally be getting the hang
of this.
My thanks for the latest edition start as always with Pragmatic Programmers, who have an efficient,
comfortable workflow that gets out of authors’ way and lets us write. (Rule number one for any
competitors who might happen to be reading this: if you make authors use MS Word, add another two
months to the schedule.) With Dave Thomas’s retirement in 2016, Andy Hunt is doing a fine job of
running the ship, and it’s always a pleasure to work with the staff there, including Susannah Davidson
Pfalzer and Janet Furlow. Most of all, it’s important to have an editor whom I click with. Rebecca
Gulick keeps me from going too deep into the woods of pounding out replicable instructions and
makes sure I deliver the “big picture” themes and ideas of every chapter. Finally, I want to give a
shout out to Prags’s other iOS authors, including Jeff Kelley, Christina Moulton, Marcus Zarra, and
Erica Sadun. And to Janie Clayton, who had other obligations and couldn’t be a big part of this
edition, but is always available on Twitter for constructive feedback or at least pictures of cooking
and pugs.
I’ve had a day job doing Swift for a couple years now, and the important thing about it isn’t just the
language, but also working in an environment where the craft and quality of the code is of such high
importance. So thanks to all my colleagues at MathElf (http://mathelf.com) for all the rigor in peer
reviews, and Dan Kokotov in particular for pushing me hard to move past twenty years of
accumulated bad habits.
In this edition, we’ve based our major example around writing a podcast client app. Part of the
reason we did this is because there are so many good podcasts by and for iOS developers; hopefully,
you’ll check some of them out. Thanks to the CocoaConf Podcast (Dave Klein, Daniel Steinberg, and
Cesare Rocchi) and Core Intuition (Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece) for letting us feature them in our
sample code and screenshots.
A big part of Prags’s books is the feedback cycle, and this title benefits greatly from the input of our
tech reviewers: Zach Jaquish, Jeff Kelley (him again!), Kevin Kim, and Scott Stevenson. I’m also
grateful to everyone who posted to the book’s forum or submitted errata during the book’s beta,
including (but hardly limited to) Mark Horrocks, David Lindelöf, Noah Patterson, Sean M. Paus, and
Robert Sherwood.