How to become an iOS developer

Developer: asif.noor@techipost.com

Motivation behind learning iOS development or becoming iOS developer

Well ! to be honest, I started iOS application development in mid of 2010 because everyone was talking about iOS and being an iOS developer you can earn more than developing for other platforms. Mobile development is dominating the market.Moving from developing applications for PC to mobile was exciting transition. Flows of application on iOS was different. Because of less memory available on phone, developers also need to do memory managements which was new to me at start when shifting from .Net development to iOS development. Tuning applications for performance is always a key goal in iOS. Do you also plan to start iOS development? then why not !

How to start and from where to start?

Lot of people in industry ask me how they can start developing awesome apps for iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod) platform. The biggest problem they face is how to setup development environment because they dont have mac machine, where to start, how can they launch apps to app store? So I am writing this post to help out all those individuals who are thinking about to start developing application for iOS platform.

1.Install Mac OS X or Snow Leopard

 The biggest hurdle for most of the people that mac machine is too expensive and they can’t buy it. So, solution is that you can install Mac operating system on your windows pc in virtual machine or dual boot. I prefer dual boot because running Mac OS in virtual machine is usually very slow. If your laptop or PC supports hardware virtualization, then you can install easily and have intel mother board. You can find out VM image on internet.

2. Install Xcode SDK as development environment so that you can start developing application for Apple platforms. You can develop application for iPhone,iPod,iPad and Mac platform also. It is just like visual studio for apple platforms. It is free of cost even if you dont have Apple developer license.

3. Resources for learning iOS development. Sequence should be first you should learn the language then iOS controls for example, how tableviews, buttons, textfields works, how we can store data in iOS applications etc.

iOS development learning resources

A.Thanks to apple for course CS 193 P Stanford University video lectures which are freely available on Youtube and iTunes.Best thing to start with is watching this Stanford Course video tutorials.

B. First you should learn Objective-C, for learning Objective-C I followed this book.

C. For learning iPhone development, alot of people including me recommends this book Beginning iPhone Development Exploring the iPhone SDK.

D. You can also look at iOS dev centre for different iOS material.

E. Lot of people recommends looking at other developers’ code. So here is link which contains lots of iOS source code. You should look at them and get the idea how to structure you iOS application. How to manage large scale project. What are best strategies while developing iOS products.

F. MIT open source iOS application source code  ”MIT-Mobile-for-iPhone“is really nice. You will learn a lot by looking at this code.

 4. I would recommend that while you are learning either through reading or by watching video lectures you should develop sample applications otherwise you will forget most of things when you develop after watching videos.

5. There are few concepts or controls that you will be using again and again while development that you must learn carefully are listed below.

• Table View
• Navigation Controller
• Tabbar Controller
• Memory management (you should study this in depth)
• Interface builder (You can drag and drop components on nibs (forms) to create GUI)
• Protocols and delegates
• JSON and XML parsing
• Reading and writing to plist
• Core Data for data storage

6.If you want to publish your apps to app store, you have to enroll yourself  in iOS developer program which cost $99 for one year. You can launch as many apps as you want in one year. Next year you have to renew this program.

7.  You can start cloning address book application while learning iOS development. It is also available in iPhone simulator. You can look at it and start cloning it.

8. For learning JSON parsing,  develop application like movie application in which you will use JSON parsing while consuming web services. Follow this link of Rotten tomatoes API.

Good luck everyone !

Let me know your thoughts, comments , suggestions.

Tags: Beginning iOS development, iOS development learning resources, iOS for beginners, Where to start iOS development

Category: IPhone, iPhone Tutorials for Beginners