Learn How to Create iOS Apps
Bugs and errors can be frustrating to fix. Unfortunately, bugs are going to happen and you will see errors from time to time. Often errors appear because of the smallest detail.
One such error that popped up when I was building a project was the “Apple mach-o linker error”. It took me about an hour to eventually track it down. Here is what you will see on screen with this error:
The documentation provided with Xcode is extremely helpful. It provides a lot of the information you’ll need to create apps for iOS devices. If you want to know how a particular class works, you look in the documentation to find exactly what is required and what methods are available. Understanding the documentation is one of the keys to being able to successfully start and finish writing an app.
You can access the documentation in several ways. This includes the web and the Xcode organizer as well as snippets of text that appear when typing in method names. Lets take a quick look at each so that you can get a good understanding of where to find the documentation.
On the web, you simply need to search for something like “corelocation class reference”. To find the official documentation, look for search results from the developer.apple.com domain name. Typing in the above search term shows the results (image to the left). The first result is the Framework reference which lists the Class References found within that framework. You can select this one, but if you want the corelocation class reference (called CLLocation and CLLocationManager) then you’ll need to select one of them on the next page.
When loading up the actual class reference for CLLocation, you will see the overview and tasks as well as what the class inherits from.
After spending several months learning Objective-C, I still found there were a few things that eluded me. This included things like not fully understanding the different between a view and a view controller on to basics such as how to read and understand the Apple iOS documentation and how to read the different methods when they pop up on auto-complete.
In December 2012 I thankfully came across a book called iOS App Development for Non-Programmers while reading the news on Zite. I had a look at the post, noticed that the book (I thought that there was just 1 at the time) was available to download on the iPad in iBooks. I decided to download a free sample to see what it was all about.
I cannot remember the specifics, but I think the first 4 chapters were available for free. I read them in the first evening within a few hours of downloading the book and thanks to the simple delivery of the content, I finally grasped what a View and View Controller was to the point where I could picture in my mind how they worked and how they were related to each other. I of course knew before what a View did, but understanding the relationship between the two was key for me.
Well, it has been a good few quite weeks in the office thanks to Christmas and the New Year. With it being the 2nd Jan, it’s time to wish you all a happy new year and let you know I’ll be diving back in to programming today.
Although I stepped away from the blog for almost a couple of weeks, I still spent some time learning and practicing. Over the past week I have learned more about views, view controllers as well as other types of controllers such as table view controllers. I have also learned a bit more about storyboarding on Xcode and how you can create a prototype app with little to no coding.
Today, I’ll be diving back in to some iOS/Xcode things and later on this week, I’ll post a few more things from my study notes of CS106A. [Read more…]
Updated for Xcode 13.
In this tutorial I will walk you through setting up your first Xcode project so that you can begin working on your first app. If you haven’t installed Xcode yet you can either grab it from the Mac App Store, or if you have an Apple iOS developers account you can download the latest beta version from within there.
Now that you have Xcode installed, it’s time to load it up. Upon loading Xcode you get the following screen:
Updated for Xcode 13
Developing apps for the Mac or the various iOS devices requires knowledge of Xcode. Xcode is a complete developer toolset that provides all the software necessary to start coding.
The download is free and can be grabbed via the Mac App Store or via developer.apple.com. There is a lot going on in the Xcode interface, but it isn’t too tricky to start once you know where the basics are.
There may be some of you interested in finding a cheap Mac so that you can begin developing iOS apps. Apple requires that you use a Mac to develop iOS apps. For those of you who already have a Mac, that’s great news as you can go ahead and download a free copy of xcode from the Mac App store, or direct from the Apple Developer website.
For those who do not have access to a Mac and are looking for a cheap option, [Read more…]
To create apps for Apple devices you need to download Xcode. The current version is Xcode 16, or to be precise its currently 16.3 as of April 2025.
You down grab the Xcode download either from the Mac App Store or from the Apple Developer website where you can find the latest production copy, or download the latest beta version.
[Read more…]Starting at the beginning in iOS developing can be quite overwhelming. My first thoughts were to just crack on with loading up Xcode and creating my first very simple app. The first hurdle I got to was that Xcode just has too many options that I don’t understand. On opening it you get to create a new project, but deciding what options to select is a challenge in its self.
The good news is that Apple doesn’t leave you guessing. It has some very nice resources to help you understand exactly what you need to create your first application. Rather than trying to jump in at the deep end, realising its actually quite difficult and then turning away from iOS developing, I first of all recommend that you read several of the official help series articles from Apple.
[Read more…]I started DevFright towards the end of 2012 with the aim to document what I learn when practicing to code. I started off jumping in to a book called “Objective-C for Dummies” and although the instruction was quite clear, I quickly found that I lacked some understanding of how a few of the basics worked.
