iOS A few beginner iOS development questions.

charlieegan3 said:

So once you have your mac for developing apps, what else do you need?

-Developers Subscription (only for later on)
-test iPad (is this necessary/just a luxury?how good is the emulator?)
...anything else I will need to budget for?

Note: This is only a hobby, not a profession - I am a computing student.

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Lots of reading material.
Sure there are some great resources online but allow for a few decent books or ebooks in your library. A general iOS book is handy but if your going to push the boundaries then good specialist books on the feature you are trying to get the most of will be a big help.

iPad or iOS apps are about touch and reactions something the simulator can't really provide. Depending on other features you want your app to have the simulator will let you down as well. Location or movement simulator won't be much use. If your doing intensive calculation it won't give you a real idea of how responsive your app will feel.

You definitely need some hardware. The Simulator works fine. I use it a lot. But its performance is different than the device. Networking is less reliable on the device than on my computer. You can be more precise in tapping controls with the mouse on the Sim than with your finger on the device so you might end up with a UI that is hard to use without knowing it. You can probably buy a used iPad 1 or iPad 2 for not too much money these days.

charlieegan3 said:

Would you say that to make a good iPad app you need an iPad though?

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Yes. I'm of the opinion that the only one capable of making an app the right way is someone who actually wants to use it themselves. Many people give me ideas for apps. If I don't want the app, I turn it down, regardless of how much money it would supposedly make, because if I don't want the app for myself, I can't make it right.

Why not? Because I'm not the target user/audience so I won't understand the features/niceties that the target users/audience will want.

You can learn everything you need for free but you have to spend time looking for the resources. Watch the eBook deal of the day thread in this forum. When good books go on sale for cheap pick them up. I've been doing this and I have a huge backlog to read through now for the same price as 2 hardcover books at retail price.

You can start development on the simulator and do most of your backend stuff. When you are going to work on the UI you should use an actual device. Then you get the full impact of using the UI. You might find that when you have a hand instead of a cursor you are constantly covering up your UI and you need to move the buttons so you can still see what is going on.

Plus it is just more fun to see your app on a device, that is what it is all about.

There is lots of good stuff online, but if you don't have know the right terms to use then the good stuff gets buried in your searches. This is the hidden advantage of the book. The authors have been in the language so long that after working through you'll build the a better vocab' to use in search terms. Or if you stuck and can't find info you can go back to a related part and get your head in the right space.

The number of times I've battled though implementing something, with various breadcrumbs of information gleamed from searches. Only to do another search using some of the terms I've learned in the process of getting it working to find the prefect tutorial or a comment about some class that makes the job so much easier.

I've also found most of the good online tutorials lead you then end with a sales pitch for the eBook once you get to the real nitty gritty of the feature.

Yup, you definitely need a device.

The emulator runs iOS code compiled to native x86/x64 code and runs on your mac (it doesn't run ARM code in emulation) and will also enable you to write code that will run in the emulator using OS X libraries that don't exist in the real device.


It is good for quick testing that something works, but it runs much faster than a real device, and just because it works in the emulator, there is no guarantee that it works on an i-device.

throAU said:

The emulator runs iOS code compiled to native x86/x64 code and runs on your mac (it doesn't run ARM code in emulation) and will also enable you to write code that will run in the emulator using OS X libraries that don't exist in the real device.

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Doesn't doing that cause warnings to show up in Xcode? I know I've accidentally used Cocoa names before (NSButton instead of UIButton, for example) and I get a warning of some sort. Then again, I've never tried adding the Cocoa library to an iOS project...

Yep