First development experience for Apple iOS (IP calculator)
I want to share my experience in developing an application for iOS (IP-calculator). The experience cannot be called successful, all the more interesting, and, I hope, my post for beginners will be more useful.
I want to say right away that my professional activity is not related to software development, and before iOS I had no programming experience for mobile platforms (except for writing simple utilities on Qt for Symbian).
Acquaintance with iOS actually began with the acquisition of the iPhone. And immediately I wanted to write something for him. Since I often have to deal with IP addresses at work, it’s not easy for me to calculate something besides the number of hosts on the network with a given mask, and it’s not always at hand to have an online or offline (cheat sheet) IP calculator, the idea arose to write a simple program that displayed some useful information at the specified IP address and mask. It is clear that the App Store already had a bunch of such applications. Nevertheless, looking through almost the entire list (about 30 applications), I did not find any that I would like to use. This strengthened me, and I firmly decided to write a fairly simple IP calculator with a strict / clean design. Make sure that I managed to do this - you canhere .
For development, I used MacOS Snow Leopard (10.6). In my opinion, it’s easiest for people with only Windows (and no mac) to use MacOS in a virtual machine. I don’t understand what caused the argument “Macintosh vs. Hackintosh, "when you can" one-click "start working with MacOS with the host Windows OS. It seems to me that for beginners (and not only) developers this is the best option.
I got used to the Objective-C language and the development environment very quickly. Two books helped me with this. The first ("Beginning iPhone 4 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK" by David Mark, Jack Nutting & Jeff LaMarche), is very simple, in which literally everything is chewed. Second("Programming in Objective-C 2.0", Stephen G. Kochan) is much more interesting, and, in my opinion, even in some ways fundamental. Of particular note is the issue of memory management. For beginners, I recommend that you first familiarize yourself with this topic (all the attention to the lifetime of objects and retain / release!) And the Leaks tool in Xcode.
In terms of development, I did not encounter any difficulties, except for the lack of the ability to use some classes when programming for older versions of iOS (3. *). In particular, this applies to gestures (UI ... GestureRecognizer) and regular expressions (NSRegularExpression). Judging by the App Strore, many developers, not too zealous, indicate in the form of the minimum version of iOS 4.0 or even 5.0 (!). Perhaps they are right, and there are not many devices with old iOS, but I have not seen statistics, so I do not want to rely only on new versions of iOS.
If you are interested, the problem with the lack of GestureRecognizer can be solved so , and with the lack of NSRegularExpression so .
For those who want to understand how to implement a pop-up menu similar to that used in the iPhone address book to copy contact numbers, this article is useful .
The process of buying a license and placing the program in the App Store is pretty simple (the only thing that needs attention is filling out Bank Info in iTunes Connect, I advise you to contact the bank if you have any questions or doubts - save time). By time: 7 days have passed since the fax was sent until the developer’s license was received, 6 days passed from the moment the program was downloaded to iTunes Connect, until it was accepted and placed on the App Store (received the first time).
You can evaluate the dynamics of purchases from the screenshot below. The program stayed in the first six for some time (it occupied 3, 5, 6 places), then it dropped out of this six and stopped buying by anyone.
A total of 17 purchases were made, the distribution by country is as follows:
- USA - 7
- France - 3
- Russia - 3
- Austria - 1
- Italy - 1
- Japan - 1
- Niger - 1
I think my first experience in developing for iOS is satisfactory, there is no positive result, but also negative. I will be glad to comments / advice / comments / questions.
UPD Thanks Infernal for the statistics on the versions used by iOS.
I do not urge copyright infringement and use for development of Mac OS, belonging to other people (violating, by the way, the license agreement). A trial version of Mac OS (valid for 31 days, for example) could solve this problem.