IT'S TIME TO GET STARTED!
I got the idea to learn app development from my sister Brooke (a former gifted student), and we talked for hours about potential ideas and things that people have done in the past like building drones, knitting, creating new species of plants, etc. Eventually I settled on the idea of app development because it is something that I've wanted to do for years, but I've never had the motivation or the time to really invest myself in the process of learning how to do it.
So I started this whole process by doing some research and I realized that to program for iOS, you need to use a program called XCode. The problem with that is that XCode is only available on Macintosh, and I have a PC... So instead of paying over $1000 to buy a new Mac, I found a workaround: I installed a virtual Mac on my PC. This is basically a Mac emulator that runs full Macintosh, so I can have the full Mac experience, including XCode.
After getting everything installed, which took far longer than I had anticipated (over 4 hours for everything to download and install), I started looking at XCode, and that's when I started realizing how complicated this is going to be. The program opened up with tons of different tabs and areas to code, and it was a little overwhelming.
So I decided to watch some online tutorials on YouTube (
this is what I used) to learn the basics, and how to use the program in general. Following the tutorial, I created an extremely basic app that only said "Hello World", which is unimpressive but it's a start. However, by making it, I have learned the basics of creating new apps and using developer features on my iPhone, so it's a start.
Plan for the upcoming 6 weeks:
Week 1: Learning the basic ins and outs of XCode
Week 2: Understanding the Swift Programming Language
Week 3: Build a simple app that incorporates most (if not all) of the knowledge I learned
Week 4-5: Learn more complicated practices for XCode and Swift
Week 5-6: Using the more complex knowledge along with the basics to develop an app that will be useful to me on a daily basis.
Clearly this is a very broad timeline, but that is on purpose. I want to be free to learn as much as I can without restrictions, because I honestly have no clue what kinds of new information I could come across, and I don't know what is easy or hard to do in XCode or Swift. This is why I don't really know what I will be able to learn, and also why I haven't set a goal to make a specific type of app yet. I just don't know what I'll learn to do in these 6 weeks.
Just learned how to use some basic navigation and invisible buttons to create a web of pages that all feed off of one home page. Here's how it works - I found a picture online of an eagle, and separated it into 4 different parts - head, wings, talons, and tail. I placed invisible buttons on top of the two wings, two talons, tail, and head. You can see the different paths in the XCode window by looking at the different lines. When you go away from the home window (the eagle pic), you get to a picture of the eagle part that you clicked on at the home page, and the navigation bar automatically shows a "Back" button and a "More Info" button. The back button brings you back to the original picture, and the 'more info' button brings you to a page that just has text with random information about the eagle body part that you clicked on at the home screen. Once you get to the more info page, the navigation bar only shows the "Back" button.
