App School (iPhone Applications)

The iPhone is the most interesting development platform since the advent of the internet. Combined with the iTunes App Store, developers can easily write and sell applications for the world’s most innovative mobile device. As Apple hosts and sells the Apps, developers can concentrate on creating interesting and beautiful applications without worrying about distribution costs or accounting.

App School teaches developers everything they need to produce their own apps—from writing their first lines of Objective-C to publishing their app in the iTunes App Store. The five days will include intensive hands-on tuition, allowing attendees to practise what they learn as they learn it. With course material designed by successful iPhone developers, App School also covers the non-obvious tricks of the trade, like how to maximise sales and distribution.

• Venue:
  
  • Dublin: Apple Training Centre, Capel Building, off Capel Street, Dublin
  • Belfast: 54 Elmwood Avenue, Belfast
• Date:
  • Belfast: November 16 – 20, 2009
  • Dublin: November 23 – 27, 2009
• Session time: 9.00 am to 5.00 pm. Registration and tea/coffee at 8.30am
• Fee :
  • Engineers Ireland Members: €1,350
  • Non Engineers Ireland €1,500
  • Unemployed or student members: €750
    
• CPD credit: 5
  

Overview

App School teaches developers everything they need to produce their own iPhone applications

Learning objectives

At the end of the five day course, learners will be able to:

1. Use Xcode and the Interface Builder.
2. Program in Objective-C.
3. Be confident with Cocoa's memory management model and common design patterns such as the delegate and observer patterns.
4. Understand what frameworks are available as part of the SDK and get started with these.
5. Be familiar with the submission/approval/publishing/selling process.

Course Outline

App School is taught over five consecutive days, beginning with an introduction to the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) and finishing with optimising profit made from App sales.

Day 1

• Introduction to the iPhone SDK
  • iPhone Developer Portal: Setting up your environment (certificates, provisioning profiles)
  • Interface Builder: Creating a user interface for an iPhone App
  • Xcode: Putting code behind your interface, and debugging that code
    

• Introduction to Objective-C: the language used to develop all Apps
  • How are classes defined? How do Objective-C objects interact?
  • What data types are available?
  • Memory-management features available in Objective-C (and iPhone limitations)
  • Objective-C 2.0 features, including properties
  • Key-Value Coding/Key-Value Observing
    

Day 2

• Introduction to Cocoa Touch
  • Architecture of iPhone application interfaces: windows, applications, views/view controllers, navigation bars/navigation controllers, bar buttons
  • Exploration of various user interface controls available for use, from simple text boxes and buttons to more complex controls such as table and web views
  • Interacting with controls: delegates and data sources
    

• Interacting with the user’s data
  • Picking people from the address book
  • Picking pictures from the photo library… or creating a new picture with the iPhone’s camera
  • Picking songs from the iPod library
    

Day 3

• Important basic data structures: Foundation framework
  • Strings
  • Numbers
  • Enumeration
  • Dates/Times
  • Timers/Threads
  • Data Streams
    

• iPhone hardware interaction
  • Detecting device orientation and responding to movement with the accelerator
  • Listening for sound
  • Making sounds
  • Geo-tagging: finding the device’s location/orientation in the world (GPS and magnetometer/compass with Core Location) and map it with Map Kit
  • Creating multi-touch interfaces
    

Day 4

• Connecting to other iPhones and computers
  • Discovering local devices
  • Socket programming with Core Foundation Network
  • Using Game Kit to communicate with other iPhones—game and voice data
  • Getting notified of events even when your app isn’t running with Push Notification
    

• The Media Layer
  • Playing back audio and video
  • Drawing 2D graphics with Quartz
  • Introduction to 3D graphics programming
  • Animated interfaces with Core Animation
    

Day 5

• Performance profiling and optimisation: making your App fast and efficient

• Going live with iTunes Connect: Getting your App on the App Store

• Selling your App
  • Choosing the right price
  • Getting people to look at it
  • Maximising your cut of the sales
  • Selling on the global market
  • Utilising micro-transactions to get profit beyond initial App Store sales.
    

Who should attend?

Anyone interested in developing iPhone Apps, be they for business or personal use. The opportunity is there to develop Apps as an income stream for budding entrepreneurs. Academics may wish to include iPhone App development in their teaching.

Trainer's Profile

SQT Training Ltd

SQT Training Ltd is Ireland’s leading training organisation and has been providing training and education solutions for 20 years. SQT’s training courses are accredited by HETAC, FETAC, and many other accreditation bodies.

App School has been developed by Daniel Heffernan and Patrick Collison and is presented by Daniel Heffernan.

Daniel Heffernan B.Sc. Multimedia and Computer Games Development, First Class Honours, University of Limerick.
Daniel has always been passionate about games and other interactive applications, and has been programming for over ten years. After completing a summer internship at Havok in San Francisco last year, he returned to the University of Limerick and began work on his final year project—”Yakumo“. This involved creating an app to allow iPhones to function as wireless game controllers. This project was chosen by IBM as the winner of the IBM Open Source Competition.

Daniel has worked for the University of Limerick between semesters to produce course material to teach programming skills for first- and second-year computer science students through gaming, including a “Zork” clone (C++) and a Robocode-based introduction to programming in Java.

Patrick Collison

Patrick is most well-known as one of Ireland’s youngest entrepreneurs. Ten months after founding Auctomatic in early 2007, it was acquired by Live Current Media for circa $5 million. After the acquisition, Patrick and his brother appeared on Late Late Show.

What Patrick is less-well known for is his wildly successful Encyclopedia app, which brings Wikipedia to iPhones even when no internet connectivity is available. Encyclopedia has sold thousands of copies and has been featured in the New York Times.

Special requirements

App School is designed for people with object-oriented programming experience. Anyone with a good understanding of object-oriented languages, such as C++, Java or C# will be able to participate fully. App School is designed for people with object-oriented programming experience. Anyone with a good understanding of object-oriented languages, such as C++, Java or C# will be able to participate fully.

All hardware and software required for the course will be provided.

Course contact

• CPD Training, Engineers Ireland
• Phone: 01 6651305 / Fax: 01 6672234
• Email: cpdtraining@engineersireland.ie