5 Things Developers Should Know While Designing iOS Apps

With the iPad’s total domination of the tablet market, and the iPhone’s continuing strong sales, many app developers may be looking to develop apps for iOS platform. When it comes to designing apps for the iOS, there are a few key things that every app developer worth his measure should keep in mind.

1. Knowledge of Objective-C is a Must
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It is the main programming language used by Apple for the OS X and iOS operating systems and their respective APIs, Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

As it is an object-oriented programming language, a lot of the syntax will be familiar to developers who already know C and C# and it should therefore be rather easy to pick up.

2. An Apple Mac is Necessary
Apps developed for iOS need XCode, Apple’s integrated development environment which includes the software development kit for both OS X and iOS, and XCode can only run on Macintosh PCs. Therefore, an Apple Mac is an absolute must for app developers looking to make apps for iOS.

3. XCode Is Radically Different From Microsoft Visual Studio
Apple’s integrated development environment (IDE), XCode, is vastly different from Microsoft’s IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio.

Visual Studio’s greatest strength might be that the vast number of programming languages it supports. Asp.net, Basic, C#, HTML5, JavaScript and XML are all supported by Visual Studio, while XCode only supports Objective-C, Java, C and C++.

4. Apple’s App Store’s Stringent Rules
Apple monitors the submitted applications very closely before it receives approval to show up on the App Store. A developer has to be thoroughly familiar with all of Apple’s terms and conditions to ensure that their apps abide by all the terms before submitting the app to App Store.

A case which will be of interest is the app called “Metadata+”, which was developed by American Josh Begley. The app, which catalogs and maps drone strikes by the United States, was rejected by Apple for a total of five times before it finally received approval.

5. iOS doesn’t Support Flash
An important thing to remember for all aspiring iOS developers is that iOS doesn’t support Flash. Flash has long been the most used technology to create rich applications such as browser-based games and video players, but due to the lack of support for Apple’s iOS among other issues such as performance, Flash has seen a lot of criticism, most tellingly by the late Steve Jobs who said that “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.”