When I started doing some real iOS app development, I had to find my way through a whole eco-system. These are my notes as I waded through Xcode, account setup, code signing, Swift,…

Administrative

• It is possible to develop iOS applications and deploy them to a device without an apple developer account

Swift

I decided to skip Objective-C and start with Swift. My first experiments were based on adapting existing code, which gave me an intrigued feeling. So I sought a book to read about Swift from basic variable to extensions and more.

iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift is exactly that book. It consists of three parts dealing with Swift, XCode and Cocoa. All start from zero and evolve to a complete overview of all fundamentals. A real page-turner.

After finishing the first part on Swift, I wanted to get my hands dirty and I implemented a Mastermind solver, trying out as many good Swift idioms as possible to get a good feeling of the pros and cons of this language that seemed to implement most of my wishes for a programming language. The code can be found on my GitHub account. Pull requests to improve (my basic understanding and limited experience with) the Swift implementation are always welcomed ;-)

I’ve also ordered Programming iOS 10 to continue my research ;-)