iOS 6 Foundations

chapter three

Looking Ahead—Planning Your App

Are you ready to start thinking about building your own app? By now, you should have looked at plenty of existing iOS software. You’ve been honing your developer’s eye for what lies beneath the surface so that you can watch how people use apps and think about how you can improve on the user experience in your own app. You’re ready to write your code.

Not yet.

Yes, you can sit down and write code for an app. But then what? What do you do with it? Do you submit it to the App Store? Do you chalk it up to a “learning experience” and then start over with a “real” app?

If you want to learn how to write apps and to actually write one, then that’s what you should do: write an app. Writing a pretend app doesn’t give you reusable experience. As a great teacher once said to a student, “If you don’t take yourself seriously, how do you expect anyone else to?” Write a real app and take yourself seriously.

You may think that you just want to learn how to write an app, and you will be glad to work with someone else who will handle the business end (and someone else to handle the graphics, and someone else to...). You don’t have to do everything yourself, and you don’t have to be an expert in everything, but you do need to know how to plan your app. That’s what this chapter is all about.

Answering the Money Question

When you tell your friends you’re working on an app, many of them will be excited for you (and for themselves—they know an app developer!). ...