Back To Basics: Intro to Object Oriented Programming

July 25, 2012 By 15 Comments

If you’re our long time follower, you know we’ve gone pretty far. By now, you should be able to build an iPhone app with tab bar, navigation controller and table view using Storyboard. One request on the top of my list, however, is to enhance the detail view of the Recipe app. Many readers mentioned the original detail view is too plain. How can we display more information including an image? That shouldn’t be difficult if you understand the materials and I intentionally left out that part for you at the time I wrote the tutorial. :-)

Did you manage to create your own detail view for the Recipe app? Anyway, we’ll revisit it and show you how to improve the detail screen. But before that, I have to introduce you the basics of Object Oriented Programming. In the next tutorial, we’ll build on top of what we learn in this tutorial and enhance the detail view screen.

Don’t be scared by the term “Object Oriented Programming” or OOP in short. It’s not a new kind of programming language but a programming concept/technique. I intentionally left out the OOP concept when I first began writing the iOS programming tutorials. I want to keep thing simple and show you (even without any programming background) how to create an app. I don’t want to scare you away with technical term. However, I think it’s time to cover the concept. If you’re still around reading this article, I believe you’re determined to learn iOS programming and you want to take your app to the next level.
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Storyboards Segue Tutorial: Pass Data Between View Controllers

June 17, 2012 By 107 Comments

This is the second article of our Storyboards series. In the first tutorial, we introduced the Storyboards, which is a friendly feature in Xcode for designing user interface. If you’ve followed the tutorial from start to end, you should already build a simple recipe app with navigation interface. But we left one thing that was not discussed: data passing between scenes (i.e. view controllers) with segue.

First, let’s take a quick look at what we’ve accomplished. Previously, we learnt to use Storyboards to build a few things:

  • Embedded a normal view controller in navigation controller
  • Created a table view and populate a list of recipes
  • Switched from one view controller to another view controller using Segue

And, this is the final deliverable. When the app is launched, it displays a list of recipes. Tap on any of them will bring you to another view, that supposes to display the details of recipes.
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iOS Programming Basic: How Does the Hello World App Work?

April 14, 2012 By 28 Comments

I hope you enjoy the first iOS programming tutorial and already created your first app. Before we move onto the next tutorial and build a more complex app, let’s step back and have a closer look at the Hello World app. It’ll be good for you to understand some of the Objective-C syntax and the inner workings of the app.

So far you follow the step-by-step guide to build the Hello World app. But as you go through the tutorial, you may come across these questions:

  • What are those .xib, .h and .m file?
  • What are those “ugly” code inside “showMessage”? What do they mean?!
  • What actually happens after you taps the “Hello World” button? How does the button trigger the “showMessage” action?
  • How does the “Run” button in Xcode work?

I want you to focus on exploring the Xcode environment so I didn’t explain any of the above in the previous post. Yet it’s essential for every developer to understand the inner details behind the code and grasp the basic concept of iOS programming. For some technical concepts, they may be a bit hard to understand particularly you have no programming background. Don’t worry, however. This is just a start. As you move on and write more code in later tutorials, you’ll get better understanding about iOS programming. Just try your best to learn as much as possible.
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Hello World! Build Your First iPhone App

April 9, 2012 By 37 Comments

I hope you have configured your development environment properly with Xcode installed. If you haven’t done so, check out our previous article about what you need to begin iOS programming. We’ll use Xcode 4.3.2 to work on the tutorial. However, you can also Xcode 4.2 to build the app in case you can’t upgrade to the latest version of Xcode.

You may have heard of “Hello World” program if you have read any programming book before. It has become the traditional program for first-time learner to create. It’s a very simple program that usually outputs “Hello, World” on the display of a device. In this tutorial, let’s follow the programming tradition and create a “Hello World” app using Xcode. Despite its simplicity, the “Hello World” program serves a few purposes:

  • It gives you a better idea about the syntax and structure of Objective C, the programming language of iOS.
  • It also gives you a basic introduction of the Xcode environment. You’ll learn how to create a Xcode project and create user interface with the built-in interface builder.
  • You’ll learn how to compile a program, build the app and test it using the Simulator.
  • Lastly, it makes you think programming is not difficult. I don’t want to scare you away. :-)

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