Developing an App the Right Way Using the Example App in this Book

Although iCloud, web services, and the application ecosystem are where certain kinds of apps are going, they certainly aren’t the place for most developers of iPad applications to start. Also, I don’t want to imply that an app necessarily needs to be cloud based. There are lots of opportunities for apps that live only on the device. But if you’re thinking about an app that can take advantage of an application ecosystem, I want to pique your curiosity and give you a frame of reference to start thinking in those terms.

So this book is about apps that live on the device, and that’s the place to start. And after you’ve mastered that, you can think about the cloud.

As I mention in the Introduction of this book, the point of this book isn’t to learn how to program in Objective-C using the iOS frameworks; instead, the point is to learn how to build applications, and that’s what you’ll be doing — learning the right way to develop applications for the iPad.

The best way I can think of to show you how to build an app is to build one, and I take you through doing that throughout this book. The app you build is called RoadTrip, and it’s based on an application I started to develop many years ago, and still think is a good idea. Although the original version that I envisioned had more features, this one isn’t too shabby. It allows you to check the weather, see the events happening at your destination, see the destination, sights, ...

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