Most of our app development in this course will take place with Apple’s free development platform, Xcode. Xcode offers three options for app development: Objective C, the really old way which most people do not use anymore, UIKit with Swift, which superseded Objective C and has been around for several years, and SwiftUI, which was released in Fall 2019 and changed my life! In Spring 2019 this course went so well that I started congratulating myself as in “Emuel, you finally got this.” Apple, apparently sensing my hubris, announced SwiftUI just a few weeks later and the leisurely summer I had envisaged became dedicated to learning SwiftUI!
The good news for you, as a student, is that SwiftUI is a better platform for App development than its predecessors and, now that I have over a year of learning and teaching it under my belt, I expect things to run smoothly this semester. Plus, some GREAT learning resources have appeared over the last year.
Get the book
Most of our lessons in this course will come from Mastering SwiftUI, which is available for $49 at Appcoda.com in various digital versions. Just get the basic, $49 package; you DO NOT NEED the full $79 starter pack. Everything else we use for this course is free, but you definitely need and are required to get this book. In addition, we will draw on a couple of surprisingly good lessons from Apple itself and hackingwithswift.com.
Also, if you are not familiar with a website named stackoverflow.com, where people ask and answer coding questions, you most likely will be by the time you finish this course. Chances are good that any question you have about Swiftui has already been addressed there.
I recommend that you read the first chapter, Introduction to SwiftUI, outside of class. Unlike all of the other chapters, it does not include a lesson, but does have a lot of useful background information about SwiftUI.
Get a Flash Drive (USB C)
Our computers are very good but woefully short on storage. The solution is for you to store your work on a Flash Drive. Here’s a good one with lots of storage:
SanDisk 256GB Ultra Dual Drive Go USB Type-C Flash Drive, Black – SDDDC3-256G-G46 https://a.co/d/b7zIeCW
Whatever you get make SURE that it is USB C or it will not work with these computers.