HOWTOlabs.net - Apple iOS Development

iOS Development
rickatech 2017-01

Elsewhere [edit]

Apple: Xcode

Apple provides a full set of development tools for iOS and OS X / MacOS development, namely Xcode.

SpriteKit

Elsewhere

raywenderlich.com:
SpriteKit Tutorial

SpriteKit is Apple’s 2D rendering engine for games, announced with iOS 7 at WWDC 2013.

iOS

Elsewhere [ edit ]

Apple: Swift Language,
iOS Web App,
Configuring Web Applications
RAYWENDERLICH:
3D Metal with Swift

For the most part there are four elements to developing iOS applications: Development Tools, Development Language, Libraries, Funds.

Development Tools means pretty much Xcode from Apple. Like many creative tools from other companies (e.g. Flash, Adobe Creative Suite), this is primarily a graphic user interface (GUI) driven tool requiring developers to have a firm grasp of what menus and control panels to use for knitting together various code snippets. Unlike solely command based development tools that can reverse search through source code to help idenifty common reference points, firm understanding Xcod proclivities is needed to leverag to using the GUI to find and update relvenet code and paramter files .

Language - long ago Apple dropped direct support for C and C++ cross platform languages for Objective C and more recently Swift. While legacy language libraries can still be compiled in, developers are forced use Apple specific languages for primary application feature devleopment. Objective C being more established, while Swift is a less verbose language which attempts to streamline some of the common patterns that Objective C requires inline code for.

Libraries - all computer platforms (i.e. Microsoft, OS X, Unix/Linux) have there native libraries which abstract and coordinate the use shared operating system functions. With iOS this is Cocoa and related Apple API's. The unique proclivities of these API's will require developers firm understanding before any significantly interesting application development can occur.

Funds - although Xcode typically is free to download, to be able to test an iOS application on a device requires a paid developer subscription. As of at least 2014 subscription fee is $99/year, which allows compiling project source code and downloading application onto devices directly, bypassing the App Store. Xcode emulation is still possible without a subscription, but many features (e.g. Metal 3D graphics) are only supported when testing on a device.

Elsewhere

stackoverflow: Why won't this apple-touch-icon work?

Add Web page icon to Home Screen

Make sure image is hosted on HTTP or HTTPS with a valid certificate. iOS won't easily reveal any SSL certificate warnings for accessing home screen image, silently aborting instead.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://public.site.org/apple-touch-icon.png">
</HEAD>
...

Mobile Safari, Limit Font Resizing

BODY {
        ...
        overflow: hidden;  //  hides scrollbar, most broswers still allow scrolling
        -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
}