So you want to be an iPhone developer. It’s actually not difficult to get started. The barrier of entry to becoming an independent app publisher has never been so low and the demand for good iOS developers is quite high.
There are over 400,000,000 people that have credit cards registered with Apple that could potentially buy your app. So want to get started?
My company, Heyalda, has had millions of downloads of its games. Now I am giving back to the developer community by creating tutorials and articles about iPhone/iPad app development.
This article is a summary of the complete tutorial available for free at heyalda.com about downloading and getting a basic understanding of Xcode, Apple’s integrated development environment (IDE) for creating apps that run on Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
Here is a summary of the tutorial.
- Overview of Xcode and how to get it
- Creating an app from a template
- Running an app in the iPhone simulator
- Getting familiar with the Xcode user interface
- Important project, target, configuration and scheme settings that you must know about
- How to run the LLDB and GDB debuggers
- How to launch Instruments to profile an app
- How to run the static code analyzer
- How to create an App ID and Provisioning profile in the Provisioning Portal
- How to add an app to iTunes Connect
- How to archive and publishing an app
The tutorial covers creating a new app from one of Apple’s templates. However, since the objective of the tutorial is to get to know Xcode, it does not discuss the details of the app code. The sample app is created using a template to have a project in Xcode to discuss.
The tutorial does not discuss how to use Interface builder to work with xib or storyboards.
The amount of detail about how to configure and use Xcode may seem overwhelimg at first. But after digesting the information in the tutorial, the experience of developing in Xcode can become pleasant and sometimes even fun.
