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FEATURE

iOS First Look

Exploring iOS Development with Xojo

Issue: 13.1 (January/February 2015)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 23,537
Starting Page Number: 52
Article Number: 13106
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.everymac.com
http://docs.xojo.com/index.php?title=Reserved_Words
http://xojo.helpdocsonline.com/deployment
http://xojo.helpdocsonline.com/migratingtoios
http://www.xojo.com/blog/en/index.php

Excerpt of article text...

Unless you've been really busy Christmas shopping the last few weeks, you know that Xojo, Inc. recently shipped Xojo 2014r3 which includes the first official support for Apple's iOS. We've been waiting for this for a long time, and it's so exciting to finally be able to write about iOS in xDev Magazine!

Let me begin by saying that iOS support represents a massive change for Xojo in many ways. We're talking a new language framework, new features (such as Auto-Layout), and new pricing, that will eventually effect everyone who uses Xojo. Even if you don't plan on making iOS apps, many of the changes required to support iOS will affect you, so learning about it is important in understanding the future of Xojo.

This article is a broad overview of what Xojo's iOS support looks like, how it works, and how difficult making iOS apps will actually be. It should help you decide if you want to explore iOS right away or perhaps wait a few months. In future issues xDev will cover more specific iOS challenges, such as how to submit your applications to the App Store.

A Different Xojo

The first and most important thing you need to understand is that writing iOS apps using Xojo, while still vastly simpler than learning an entirely new environment such as Apple's XCode, is still a lot of work. Don't think you can just open an existing project, copy some elements into an iOS version, and hit compile. It just doesn't work that way.

First, iOS apps don't behave in the same way as desktop or web apps: you're going to have to learn a new way of thinking about app design. (You also have to think of designing for different size devices, such as iPad versus iPhone.)

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