I wished that when I started out with iOS development, that I knew that to get success on the App Store, 80% is marketing, and 20% is the quality of the app.
iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#42As long as the beginners are drifting by, lemme say this: Every nib you use is a boatload of code you don't have to maintain. Use nibs. Can they solve every problem? Goodness no. But they're a great way to get the basics of your views laid out. They give you an easy way to preview the behavior of your view when layout changes. And they're very forgiving when you change your mind. Changing text alignment? One click. W…
In all the teams I've worked on, designers have worked out pixel positions and text alignment by the time I see the mocks. I don't find much value in realtime feedback.
Nibs are handy if you're sticking to stock UI and stock behavior. Programmatic layout takes longer to setup the boilerplate, but once it's in place, I find it about as easy to work in code as nibs. With complex designs, I find it significantly easier to work programmatically.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#43For starters, do go through the iOS development by paul hegarty videos from here,
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application...
The 15 hours of video is the best investment of your time if you want to jump start into iOS development.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#44Here's a quick tip: you can also disable arc for older libraries should you need to integrate them into your ARC project.
Just use the -fno-objc-arc flag (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6646052/how-can-i-disable...)
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#45I've been programming iOS for a couple of years now and some of those tips where useful to me!
Anyhow as we're contributing top tips, my one is 'Always run your app on target hardware.'
Don't rely on the emulators, especially if your're doing OpenGL work. You will only know your framerate by running your app/game on the real hardware.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#46I wished that when I started out with iOS development, that I knew that to get success on the App Store, 80% is marketing, and 20% is the quality of the app.
I would urge indie developers to also be learning a separate language and doing web apps so they have a way to pivot if the iOS app is unprofitable. Web apps seem like less of a lottery.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#47Here's a quick tip: you can also disable arc for older libraries should you need to integrate them into your ARC project. Just use the -fno-objc-arc flag ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6646052/how-can-i-disable... )
Alternatively you can also enable ARC for classes. This might be useful when you're working with a non-ARC project and want to include some ARC code. Use the switch -fobjc-arc to enable ARC for selected classes.
I'm currently using this switch to gradually migrate a non-ARC project to ARC.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#48I wished that when I started out with iOS development, that I knew that to get success on the App Store, 80% is marketing, and 20% is the quality of the app.
iOS development != App Store success. This would actually be my advice for anyone starting out:
1. Make an app that looks awesome as a reference (and don't expect anyone to ever, ever use it)
2. Get a job as an iOS contractor
3. If you have enough experience and a good idea, make your decision between a reliable cash flow and becoming an App Store cowboy. But only then.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#49Utilizing storyboards and xibs is one of the best way to decrease development time. Stop the coding madness!!!! The only people I still know that avoid heavy utilization of these do not understand how to properly use them. Go learn!
How do I set up view containment in iOS5 with Storyboards so I can have multiple segues in a dashboard view? This is something that I was just looking into last night.
Re: iOS Development Tips If You're Just starting Out
#50If you use ARC from the start, then can you really understand block retain cycles (which are just two bullet items below)?
I would absolutely try to write one or two "Hello World" apps without ARC first. CMIIW but Xcode will highlight any instance where you do things differently than ARC would, there is plenty of feedback on what you are doing. And once you feel confident enough, upgrading the project just takes a few clicks.
And I found ARC to be super easy not in spite, but because I came from C++ :) it is shared_ptr vs weak_ptr all over again. Don't memcpy() them, don't create cyclic references, beware race conditions when testing if a weak_ptr is still there ...