Supporting legacy iOS apps with UIKit

This course is aimed at developers who need to support existing UIKit applications. Anyone looking to develop a new app should consider our Modern iOS App Development Training Course instead.

Delegates should have attended our Introduction to iOS app development or have equivalent experience with the Swift language (or similar languages such as Python, Kotlin, Objective-C or C#.

This iOS with UIKit course is available for private / custom delivery for your team - as an in-house face-to-face workshop at your location of choice, or as online instructor-led training via MS Teams (or your own preferred platform).

Get in touch to find out how we can deliver tailored training which focuses on your project requirements and learning goals.

Introduction to Swift

• Trainer and Delegate Introductions / Intro to course

• Foundations of Swift

• XCode Playgrounds

• Basics of the language: Types, Operators, Conditionals, Iterators, Strings, Arrays, Dictionaries

• Lab 1: Trying out the language basics

Introduction to using Xcode

• Making first app / toolkit features

• MVC and linking code to Storyboards

• Using the documentation

• Introduction to UIKit

• Lab 2: Building and running single screen apps on simulator and device

UIKit: Views and controls

• Attributes of common views

• Adding controls to your app

• Adding more views

• Lab 3: Building apps with more views and controls

Functions

• Function parameters and results

• Argument labels

• Default values

• Lab 4: Writing functions

Prototyping an interface design

• Deciding what goes into the app

• Making the screens for a multi-screen app and joining them

• Trying out the app on potential users

• Taking Apple design considerations and HCI guidelines into account

• Lab 5: Building an app prototype without code

Structs and Classes

• Creating structs and initialising them

• Properties and access methods and using them

• Classes - Initializers, methods and properties

• When to use classes and structs

• Lab 6: Creating and using Structs and Classes

Working with different screen sizes

• Autolayout

• Stack layout

• Lab 7: Fitting many items on different size screens

• Further exercises on Autolayout

Dictionaries/Optionals / Guard / Scope

• Dictionaries/why we need optionals

• How to use them correctly

• Making code tidy with Guard

• Understanding scope of variables

• Lab 8: Optionals and Guard

Advanced navigation in UIKit

• Segues

• Navigation

• Tab bars

• Lifetime of an app

• Lab 9: Making complex apps

Making a multi-screen app

• Lab 10: Bringing what we learned so far together

Building dynamic tables

• Basic tables

• Linking to child screens

• Passing child data

• Customising table cells

• Linking to multiple child screens

• Lab 11: Building tables

Protocols, closures

• Built in protocols – CustomStringConvertible, Equatable, Comparable, Codable

• Defining and implementing your own protocols

• Using closures

• Shortening closures

• Lab 12: Protocols and Closures

Location facilities

• Setting up location services

• Tracking movement

• Annotating maps

• Lab 13: Adding Maps to an app

Interacting with taps and the accelerometer

• Implementing taps and swipes

• Using the accelerometer

• Lab 14: Example apps using taps, swipes and the accelerometer

Animations

• How animations are used in iOS

• Delighting users with animations

• Types of animation that are possible

• Lab 15: Building animations

Data storage with Codable

• Application sandbox

• Codable with JSON and PLists

• Where and how to save data in iOS

• SQLite for complex data

• Lab 16: Extended lab bringing together work on tables, data access and storing data

Web browsing, web services

• Integrating web browsing into your app

• Calling web services and receiving data asynchronously

• Concurrency and Grand Central Dispatch

• Processing data and updating screens

• Lab 17: Reading and processing data from a web service

Unit Testing

• Identifying what to unit test

• Setting up tests

• Running tests in XCTest

• Lab 18: Writing Unit Tests for iOS Apps

Delivering to the App Store

• Registering an app

• Getting ready to make an app live

• Choices for how to deliver an app

• App analytics

Bringing it all together in a complex app

• Final Case Study

• developer.apple.com/swift/ - The official Swift programming language website by Apple.

• developer.apple.com/xcode/ - Information and downloads for Xcode, Apple's integrated development environment.

• developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/ - Apple's official documentation for the SwiftUI framework.

• swift.org/ - The Swift open-source community website.