I'm a front-end programmer and I mostly code in javascript. I'm doing a project right now in which none of my skills are needed and I offered to do the front-end of the app with the new Swift lang.<p>I've bought a new mac and an iOS dev account but I find the event handling pretty weird and I'm a little overwhelmed by all the features and specific way you need to set this up. In the project deadline I've included a timeframe for me to learn. What is the best way to do this? All help/tips are appreciated.
If you're mostly familiar with JavaScript, I wouldn't bother to learn Objective C now and continue to focus on Swift. You're probably struggling more with Xcode and Interface Builder then with the Swift language itself. If you want to stick to JavaScript for that particular project, you might want to consider Appcelerator Titanium: <a href="http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/" rel="nofollow">http://www.appcelerator.com/titanium/</a> which allows you to build iOS apps in JavaScript. It generates an Xcode project which compiles to native code; with the limitation being that you only have access to a subset of the vast cocoa and cocoa touch functionalities. Basically, if there's a particular functionality available in iOS which doesn't have a 'stub' in Ti, you're SOL (or need to find a 33rd party Ti module which might fill the gap).
I would recommend learning Objective-C. For your first app, you'll probably be doing a lot of Google and Stack-overflow searches and the vast majority of results and examples are in Objective-C.<p>I would also recommend picking up one of the Big Nerd Ranch iOS books [1] as I found them quite helpful. Good luck.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-programming.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-programming.html</a>
I disagree completely about the swift thing. It may look a bit like Javascript on the very surface, but it's a whole different thing, if you know Javascript you know zero Swift ( except for syntactic sugar in the lambdas and declaring simple variables ).<p>Having said that, IMHO your best shot to get something done now would be Titanium or Phonegap.<p>Cheers.<p>Ps: Stay away from Swift until it's solid and there are more learning resources.
I would code it using Obj-C. There is exponentially more community and example code on the internet. The frameworks are the same between both languages so you can reuse most of what you learn from ObjC when you decide to do a Swift app.<p>I would highly recommend buying a book. APress makes excellent iOS books, this is how I learned. The latest one is called 'Beginning iOS 7 Development Exploring the iOS SDK’
I recommend starting with something small, perhaps even a simple game to get your feet wet. The build environment and the first time through the app approval process can be a little daunting, so starting with something simple might help. You can always remove an approved app if you don't like it hurting your image.