Programming iOS 8 : Dive Deep into Views, View Controllers, and Frameworks

Start building apps for iOS 8 with Apple’s Swift programming language. If you’re grounded in the basics of Xcode and the Cocoa framework, this book provides a structured explanation of all essential real-world iOS app components. Through deep exploration and copious code examples, you’ll learn how to create views, manipulate view controllers, and use iOS frameworks for adding features such as audio and video, access to user calendars and photos, and tracking the device’s location.

Example code is available on GitHub in the form of full projects that you can download, study, and run.

• Build iOS apps with Swift
• Create, arrange, draw, layer, and animate views that respond to touch
• Use view controllers to manage multiple screens in a way that’s understandable to users
• Explore UIKit interface objects, such as scroll views, table views, popovers, web views, and maps
• Work with Cocoa frameworks for sensors, location, sound, and video
• Access user libraries: music, photos, address book, and calendar
• Examine additional topics including data storage, file sharing, networking, and threading

Topics new to iOS 8 include:

• Major changes in app coordinate space and interface rotation
• Trait collections and size classes
• View margins, visual effect views, and major animation changes
• Changes to presented view controllers, popovers and split view controllers, alert and action sheet architecture
• Table view automatic variable row heights and sliding cells
• Classes for search results display, web view, video display, and audio mixing and effects
• Today extensions, Actions extensions, Photo Editing extensions
• Xcode 6 features: conditional constraints, view debugging, designable views, inspectable properties, new segue types

Matt Neuburg started programming computers in 1968, when he was 14 years old, as a member of a literally underground high school club, which met once a week to do timesharing on a bank of PDP-10s by way of primitive teletype machines. He also occasionally used Princeton University's IBM-360/67, but gave it up in frustration when one day he dropped his punch cards. He majored in Greek at Swarthmore College, and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1981, writing his doctoral dissertation (about Aeschylus) on a mainframe. He proceeded to teach Classical languages, literature, and culture at many well-known institutions of higher learning, most of which now disavow knowledge of his existence, and to publish numerous scholarly articles unlikely to interest anyone. Meanwhile he obtained an Apple IIc and became hopelessly hooked on computers again, migrating to a Macintosh in 1990. He wrote some educational and utility freeware, became an early regular contributor to the online journal TidBITS, and in 1995 left academe to edit MacTech Magazine. He is also the author of Frontier: The Definitive Guide and REALbasic: The Definitive Guide. In August 1996 he became a freelancer, which means he has been looking for work ever since. He is the author of Frontier: The Definitive Guide and REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, both for O'Reilly & Associates.