Your First iOS & SwiftUI App: An App from Scratch

Hi, everyone. I’m Jessy. I work with Ray, who is the instructor of this course. He originally recorded this using iOS 14 and Xcode 12. The current versions are now iOS 15 and Xcode 13.

But I’ve gone through this whole course myself, using these latest tools. And it’s still in perfectly-working condition.

There is only one place that I’ve found where Apple updated how you accomplish something Ray will be demonstrating in SwiftUI. It’s in episode 12.

When you get there, I’ll come back onscreen, and let you know how to proceed. But for now, I’ll hand it off to Ray!

Hey what’s up everybody, this is Ray.

If you’re brand new to iOS and Swift development and wondering where to get started, this is the course for you.

In this course, you’ll learn how to create your very first iOS app…

…a simple but fun iPhone game called Bull’s Eye. We’ll teach you everything you need to know along the way - even if you’re a complete beginner to iOS and Swift development.

This course is meant for folks at all levels of programming experience: it’s good for experienced developers new to iOS and Swift, and it’s good for people who’ve never programmed at all.

You’ll create Bull’s Eye using SwiftUI…

…which is the hot new way to create user interfaces for your apps in Swift. SwiftUI is fun, visual, and still really new, so by learning it now, you’ll be gaining a serious head start over other developers.

We’ll begin by learning what SwiftUI is, and how it differs from UIKit, which is the previous way of making user interfaces on iOS. You’ll learn the answer to the burning question you might have - “Should I learn SwiftUI? Should I learn UIKit? Or Should I learn Both?”

We’ll then explain the approach we’ll be taking in our iOS and SwiftUI for Beginners learning path. In this learning path, you will create two iOS apps from scratch, learning a ton about Swift along the way.

Then, we’ll create a brand new project in Xcode 11 so we can build the entire app from scratch. We’ll get started with SwiftUI by building the basic user interface for the app…

…and apply some basic styling with SwiftUI view modifiers.

In the second part of the course, you’ll learn how to make the app interactive, by making your button run an action when tapped to print a message to the console.

You’ll learn about an important concept called SwiftUI state, and use that to make the button display a popup alert instead of a console message.

In the third part of the course, you’ll get some hands-on practice coding with the Swift language. You’ll learn about key Swift concepts like if else statements, variables, constants, type inference, and the Swift standard library.

We’ll even cover useful techniques you’ll frequently use as a developer in the real world, like Unit Testing and Test-Driven Development.

This course is designed to be hands-on, where we’ll build the app together step-by-step. It’s very important that you don’t just watch the excercises, but actually follow along. Open up Xcode, type along with me, and run the app we build in the Simulator. This helps you understand how the app gets built step by step.

In addition, the course contains several hands-on challenges, where you’ll get to practice what you’ve just learned on your own. It’s in your best interest to actually pause the video and try solving the challenges - you’ll learn a ton by doing this. There is a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path… And the only way to learn programming is to actually do it.

It is my sincere belief that this course, and those to follow in our learning paths, can turn you from a complete newbie into an accomplished iOS developer, but you do have to put in the time and effort. By making this course, we’ve done our part. The rest is up to you!

One final note - SwiftUI - and hence this course - requires you to have the latest version of Xcode installed: which at the time of making this video, is Xcode 12.

So be sure to go to the Mac App Store and download Xcode 12 if you haven’t already - and don’t worry, it’s a free download.

OK - so let’s blast off into our iOS adventure - starting by designing how our app should work!