Content Based App: How much Objective C knowledge is needed?

[Joshua4missions]

Hey fellow developers,

My name is Joshua, I'm fairly new to iOS developing and am in the process of learning and practicing Objective C whilst learning Xcode and how to get around in it.

Seeing as I'm new, I want to think small first, rather than thinking big and getting discouraged fast to to a lack of knowledge of programming, Cocoa touch, and app deveopment in general.

So basically as a start I want to make a content based app where:

At start display Splash screen followed by main menu displaying Topic Categories(via Table cells). From main menu user selects category and goes to a sub menu/page and from there views content added via RSS.
Some Pages I want to display text/pictures(think of it like a blog with posts of text and images) whilst other pages I'd like to display media like photo albums and videos.


I want to know how much Objective C is needed to do this. I'm not dealing with objects or complex functions but rather just menu's and content. How would you suggest I do these things. Later as I get more fluent with th basics, I can expand my knowledge of Objective C and the Cocoa frameworks etc...

I tried Appmakr but Apple rejected it due to it's simplicity, so I want to make the app from scratch to open up the possibilities in app development.


Thank you very much in advance for your time, and for any help I receive.



Joshua

[Duncan C]

Originally Posted by Joshua4missions

Hey fellow developers,

My name is Joshua, I'm fairly new to iOS developing and am in the process of learning and practicing Objective C whilst learning Xcode and how to get around in it.

Seeing as I'm new, I want to think small first, rather than thinking big and getting discouraged fast to to a lack of knowledge of programming, Cocoa touch, and app deveopment in general.

So basically as a start I want to make a content based app where:

At start display Splash screen followed by main menu displaying Topic Categories(via Table cells). From main menu user selects category and goes to a sub menu/page and from there views content added via RSS.
Some Pages I want to display text/pictures(think of it like a blog with posts of text and images) whilst other pages I'd like to display media like photo albums and videos.


I want to know how much Objective C is needed to do this. I'm not dealing with objects or complex functions but rather just menu's and content. How would you suggest I do these things. Later as I get more fluent with th basics, I can expand my knowledge of Objective C and the Cocoa frameworks etc...

I tried Appmakr but Apple rejected it due to it's simplicity, so I want to make the app from scratch to open up the possibilities in app development.


Thank you very much in advance for your time, and for any help I receive.



Joshua

What you describe is actually a fairly complex app. It has table views, master/detail, downloading and displaying RSS content, etc. I'm afraid you're wrong when you say "I'm not dealing with objects or complex functions but rather just menu's and content."

Before diving into a full-fledged app, I would suggest reading a book, or going through a set of tutorials. I just bought the latest version of the Aaron Hillegass Objective C book. I haven't really delved into it yet, but it looks to be a well written start-from-the-beginning introduction to Objective C. I've read some of Hillegass's other books, and they're very good.

You need to learn the fundamentals of Objective C, Cocoa memory management, protocols, delegates, the MVC design pattern, and a variety of other subjects. You will also need to learn your way around some of the building block classes that are needed to write Objective C programs: NSString, NSNumber, NSDictionary, and a variety of others, as well as a number of UIKit classes like UIViewController, UIView, UIImageView, UIWebView, UITableView, and several others.

[dacapo]

The ironic thing is that even though the coding could be fairly complex as Duncan describes, having a native app do what you describe won't make it any more functional in the eyes of the App Reviewers.

In essence, all you will be doing is scraping some web content and displaying it.

If you actually have content that is local to the bundle, then your chances of approval are higher. But then, you'll need to figure out how to update that content, so it can quickly become quite complex for a beginner's project...