

Ask HN: About to code iOS8 iPhone app but havn't done any iOS dev yet - basdevries

I&#x27;m a front-end programmer and I mostly code in javascript. I&#x27;m doing a project right now in which none of my skills are needed and I offered to do the front-end of the app with the new Swift lang.<p>I&#x27;ve bought a new mac and an iOS dev account but I find the event handling pretty weird and I&#x27;m a little overwhelmed by all the features and specific way you need to set this up. In the project deadline I&#x27;ve included a timeframe for me to learn. What is the best way to do this? All help&#x2F;tips are appreciated.
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moonlighter
If you're mostly familiar with JavaScript, I wouldn't bother to learn
Objective C now and continue to focus on Swift. You're probably struggling
more with Xcode and Interface Builder then with the Swift language itself. If
you want to stick to JavaScript for that particular project, you might want to
consider Appcelerator Titanium:
[http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/](http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/)
which allows you to build iOS apps in JavaScript. It generates an Xcode
project which compiles to native code; with the limitation being that you only
have access to a subset of the vast cocoa and cocoa touch functionalities.
Basically, if there's a particular functionality available in iOS which
doesn't have a 'stub' in Ti, you're SOL (or need to find a 33rd party Ti
module which might fill the gap).

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xyclos
I agree with this to a certain extent. However, my experience with
appcelerator was that the paradigms behind doing this type of development were
very different from writing js in the browser. Although this offers a familiar
language, there may still be just as much of a learning curve to learning to
write native ios apps. That potentially being the case: if you're not required
to support any other platforms right now other than ios, then just focus on
learning Obj-C/Swift.

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ddv
I would recommend learning Objective-C. For your first app, you'll probably be
doing a lot of Google and Stack-overflow searches and the vast majority of
results and examples are in Objective-C.

I would also recommend picking up one of the Big Nerd Ranch iOS books [1] as I
found them quite helpful. Good luck.

[1] [http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-
programming.html](http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-programming.html)

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MrGando
I disagree completely about the swift thing. It may look a bit like Javascript
on the very surface, but it's a whole different thing, if you know Javascript
you know zero Swift ( except for syntactic sugar in the lambdas and declaring
simple variables ).

Having said that, IMHO your best shot to get something done now would be
Titanium or Phonegap.

Cheers.

Ps: Stay away from Swift until it's solid and there are more learning
resources.

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basdevries
Thanks for giving me a heads up. I've indeed only looked trough the syntax and
as far as I can tell it's pretty similar to javascript/python/coffeescript. I
know all of these, so I thought Swift would be easy once I understand the rest
of iOS dev. Could you elaborate a bit more on why it's a whole different
thing?

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jjellyy
I would code it using Obj-C. There is exponentially more community and example
code on the internet. The frameworks are the same between both languages so
you can reuse most of what you learn from ObjC when you decide to do a Swift
app.

I would highly recommend buying a book. APress makes excellent iOS books, this
is how I learned. The latest one is called 'Beginning iOS 7 Development
Exploring the iOS SDK’

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chrisBob
I recommend starting with something small, perhaps even a simple game to get
your feet wet. The build environment and the first time through the app
approval process can be a little daunting, so starting with something simple
might help. You can always remove an approved app if you don't like it hurting
your image.

