DevCon5 HTML5 & Mobile App Developer Conference Announces iOS Tutorial

TMC and Crossfire Media today announced the addition of the Tutorial: Creating iOS Apps in Swift at the DevCon5 HTML5 & Mobile App Developer Conference , July 20-22, 2015 in New York City at New York University’s Kimmel Center. The tutorial will be presented by Mark Meretzky, Adjunct Associate Professor of Information Technologies at NYU will take place on Monday from 8AM until 4PM. DevCon5 will focus on using HTML5 and other development tools to create mobile apps that provide a superior user experience while appealing to large numbers of those users.

“The best part is that the move to swift helps reduce the problems of developing unique code for specific platforms while still optimizing the power of the Apple Ecosystem.”

The full-day tutorial will focus on writing iOS apps in Apple’s new language Swift, using the Xcode IDE on Macintosh. An iPhone or iPad app is made of intercommunicating objects, and during the tutorial attendees will learn to create and destroy them and call their methods in Swift.

Tutorial: Creating iOS Apps in Swift sessions include:

• Features and Quirks of Swift– Each programming language has its peculiarities, and Apple’s new language Swift is no exception. Attendees will learn about the quirks in Swift: the syntax for creating variables and data structures such as arrays and dictionaries, and the exotic features such as protocols and optional variables.
• What Happens when an iOS App is Launched?- Five objects are created automatically when an iOS app is launched: the application, the application delegate, the window, the view, and the view controller. Attendees will learn how these objects are connected and what their responsibilities are.
• Let’s Draw a Still Life– The first apps created by attendees will draw static text and graphics on the screen but will not move or respond to a touch.
• Creating a Touch Sensitive App– The touch-sensitive app created by attendees will receive a set of “touch objects” from the screen and will react to them by redrawing the picture. Since the touch objects are delivered in a “set”, attendees will have to make a digression about this data structure.
• Animation– This portion of the tutorial will focus on making a simple animation, i.e., a graphic that moves under its own power without having to be dragged around by a finger.
• Gesture Recognition– An app can get the x, y coordinates on the screen of the point where a finger touches. It can also recognize higher-level gestures: horizontal vs. vertical swipe, single vs. double tap, and pinch vs. spread.
• Controls and their Target Objects– A “control” is an object such as a button, slider, or fill-in box. To make the control do something useful, we must connect it to a separate object called the “target” or “delegate” of the control. When the control is touched, a method of the target or delegate is automatically called.
• Class UIWebView for Platform-Independent HTML5– An object of class UIWebView can render a page of HTML5 on the screen. The page can be pre-stored in the app, or can be downloaded from the web while the app is running. The page can even be composed by the app itself. The page can contain functions written in the language JavaScript, which can be called by the Swift methods of the app. Since an HTML5 page can also be rendered by Android, this is one way to write code that can be executed on both platforms.

“We are delighted that Apple continues to come close to the JavaScript community with Swift as their framework replacing Objective C. Getting up to speed with Swift is what the pre conference is all about and our goal is to have experienced coders ready to make the transition. Using the Swift framework takes away many of the issues in coding with Objective C and makes Apple more approachable for the rest of us who have been using JavaScript and Java for our mobile app development,” said Carl Ford, CEO, Crossfire Media, executive director of content, DevCon5. “The best part is that the move to swift helps reduce the problems of developing unique code for specific platforms while still optimizing the power of the Apple Ecosystem.”