iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners

by Rory Lewis

Overview

The iPhone is the hottest gadget of our generation, and much of its success has been fueled by the App Store, Apple’s online marketplace for iPhone applications. Over 1 billion apps have been downloaded in the 9 months the App Store has been open, ranging from the simplest games to the most complex business apps. Everyone has an idea for the next best-selling iPhone app—presumably that’s why you’re reading this now. And with the release of the iPad, this demand will just continue to grow.

So how do you build an application for the iPhone and iPad? Don’t you need to spend years learning complicated programming languages? What about Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, and the software development kit (SDK)? The answer is that you don’t need to know any of those things. Anybody can start building simple applications for the iPhone and iPad, and this book will show you how.

This book takes you to getting your first applications up and running using plain English and practical examples. It cuts through the fog of jargon and misinformation that surrounds iPhone and iPad application development, and gives you simple, step-by-step instructions to get you started.

• Teaches iPhone and iPad application development in language anyone can understand
• Provides simple, step-by-step examples that make learning easy
• Offers videos that enable you to follow along with the author—it’s like your own private classroom

What you’ll learn

• Get both yourself and your computer set up for iPhone and iPad application development.
• Start by making small changes to existing applications to build your knowledge and experience before creating your own applications.
• Follow steps in plain English to build simple apps and get them working immediately.
• Style your application so that it looks good and users can easily navigate through it.
• Make use of the iPhone’s touch screen and accelerometer.
• Use shortcuts and cheat sheets to create apps the easy way.

Who this book is for

If you have a great idea for an iPhone or iPad app, but have never programmed before, then this book is for you. You don’t need to have any previous computer programming skills—as long as you have a desire to learn, and you know which end of the mouse is which, you’ll be fine.

Table of Contents

1. Before We Get Started 
2. Blast-Off! 
3. What’s Next?  
4. An Introduction to the Code  
5. Buttons & Labels with Multiple Graphics 
6. Switch View with Multiple Graphics  
7. Dragging, Rotating, and Scaling  
8. Table Views, Navigation, and Arrays  
9. MapKit

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781430227014
Publisher:	Apress
Publication date:	06/06/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Rory Lewis is assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is often mistaken for a hippie, wearing Dead-head shirts and walking aimlessly around the campus. He is often described as the guy in the office where students are always lined up outside. He is often heralded as the dude that will explain your math and computer code, even when he first checks and sees you ve done 800 tweets and 2,700 Facebook comments while you should have been in class! He is described by his adult daughters as a dad that was once a successful microprocessor litigation lawyer in Palo Alto, but couldn t resist his dorkiness and went back to school to become a doctor of geekdom!

Table of Contents

1. Getting the tools
2. Your first app
3. Running your app on a device
4. Your second app
5. Going deeper: Patterns and Delegates
6. Debugging
7. Common Controls
8. Pickers and Date Pickers
9. Tables and Table Views
10. Maps
11. Browser and Web Applications
12. iPad Applications

13. App Store Deployment