DPS923 MAP523 Week 2 Notes

The theme for this week is to get comfortable with the process of creating a simple iOS app.

For the next several weeks, we have our classroom session on Monday, and our computer-lab session on Wednesday.

Monday plan

The professor will guide you through the topics in the textbook.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The One-Button App
Chapter 3: Slider and Labels

Wednesday plan

Work on Assignment 1. The professor will help you get started, to ensure that you can make progress.

Today, we introduce a topic - outlets - that are fully covered next week. There are a couple of reasons for today’s introduction of outlets:

1. It shows you a way to enable your code to make changes in the view
2. It enables you to learn a new Xcode feature, the “Assistant Editor”

This week, you learned something about actions, which enable user interactions on a view to call a function in your code. An outlet works in the other direction.

When covering actions, you learned the Xcode technique to make a connection from the view to some of your code. Today, when introducing outlets, you can learn another Xcode technique to combine the connection-making with the code-writing, by using the Assistant Editor.

To effectively use the Assistant Editor, do the following:

1. In Xcode, show the storyboard.
2. Above the view, in the tray strip, select/highlight the left-most “view controller” icon.
3. Open the Assistant Editor, using the top-right button or the keyboard shortcut.
4. If you need more room left-and-right, hide the navigation panel, and the utilities panel. (And maybe the storyboard list of objects.)

Learning resources

iOS Apprentice
Chapters 1, 2, 3