miércoles, 8 de febrero de 2012

Review of “Introduction to iOS Programming: From Getting the SDK to Submitting Your First App”

13:11 by Zalakain · 0 comentarios

From zero to publishing in less than 2 hours

It’s been a while since my last post, due to some work outburst. Nevertheless I had a lot of interest in watching this video from O’Reilly author Alasdair Allan because I am (was?) a complete ignorant on native iOS development.  The video, about 1:45 hours long in total, covers the whole development process of any iOS based application. As the video’s subtitle states, Alasdair guides us from the very basic steps like registering on Apple’s Development platform, downloading the required SDKs and setting them up, etc. all the way to publishing our very first App on the Apple Store.

 

This is done whilst creating our first iOS/iPhone app, on a Mac. So, after the first steps we will be watching code being typed to create the app. For those already versatile in Objective-C this will be “piece of cake”. For the rest of us it takes some time to get used to the mechanics and interface so as to be able to follow Alasdair’s work, but once you get used to it, it’s not that hard.

 

There is no detail on how to develop UIs for apps, nor in-depth how to code with Objective-C (btw, who was the devil that created that monster? Bit ugly, IMHO), but this video is not the place to look for that info nor it should be. However, Alasdair makes a “stop” trying to explain how to code with Objective-C, which turns out to be somehow hard to follow although it is just a basic approach to the language. This “aside” is not really efficient on its purpose, but must be praised for the effort and some may welcome it.

 

The quality overall is good though I found two glitches on it:

- the sound sometimes is a bit too low, and given most of the people watching it will use a mobile device nowadays to do so this can be a bit annoying as listening Alasdair is difficult sometimes.

- and second, sometimes Alasdair gets into some small “stopping point” because of code failures or development interface nuisances. These he manages to solve, but sometimes it feels a bit wrong watching “undo time”.

 

All in all, a good video on the complete procedure of start-to-publish your iOS apps that any newcomer to Apple’s development restrictive world will benefit from. Maybe some “freebies” such as sample code and worksheets would have provided it better value. You can find the product here.

 

3/5