Vandad Nahavandipoor - iOS 7 programming cookbook: solutions for iOS developers

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This edition of the book is not just an update, but a total remake of the previous edition. iOS 7 changed everything: the look and feel, the way we use our iOS devices, and most importantly, the way we program for iOS devices. This called for a substantial rewrite indeed. I have added roughly 50 new recipes to this book, talking about things such as UIKit dynamics, collection views, the keychain, push notifications, and whatnot. I have also gone through all the example codes and figures and updated them for iOS 7.

iOS 7 is a huge step forward for this amazing operating system that we all, as programmers and users, have grown to love and enjoy programming for. You must have noticed how the focus of iOS 7 is on being dynamic : how your UI should adapt to various movements and motions that can be applied to the device. What I mean by that is Apple wants developers to really look at the details of their apps and bring real-world physics and dynamics into them. Thats why Apple introduced UIKit Dynamics to the SDK, and that is why this book has a whole chapter dedicated to this concept. The more expensive a high-end device such as the new iPhone becomes, the more demanding the users will get as well. Nobody blames them, though! They have just bought a fantastic and top-of-the-line new iPhone or iPad and they want to see amazing apps running on them, leveraging all the capabilities that those devices have to offer.

That is why now more than ever developers have to get an in-depth knowledge of the SDK and what the SDK has to offer to the developers so that we can create better and faster apps for iOS users. Apple introduced a lot of cool new APIs to the iOS 7 SDK, and we are going to explore them in this book.

The focus of iOS 7 is dynamics!

Before you read about this book, maybe youd like to know about my background a bit and how I can help you through this journey. I will just briefly let you know who I am and how I got to love iOS. I started out writing Basic code for my Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I then moved on to buy my own PC and started experimenting with Assembly code. At first, it was 8-bit Assembly for DOS. I then moved onto writing my own hobby operating system, which was never really released as a commercial product, for 32-bit Intel x86 CPU architectures.

Among all the programming languages that I have programmed in, Assembly and Objective-C are the two that have really been different from the others, and Ive really liked them. Assembly because of the purity of the language: a command does only one thing and does that one thing well. I believe that I like Objective-C for the same reason, and in fact iOS shares the same trait with Assembly and Objective-C. Even though iOS is an operating system and not a programming language, whatever it does, it does it best and better than its rivals. From its simplicity to the sheer power that you can harvest from the software and the hardware combined, using technologies such as GCD, the bar that iOS has set in terms of ease of use and beauty is unprecedented.

This edition of the book has seen all the recipes inside all chapters completely renewed for iOS 7. All screenshots have been updated, and many more recipes such as those related to security and the keychain, UI dynamics, collection views, push and local notifications, and many more have exclusively been written for this edition of the book. I really have had a fun time writing this edition of the book, and packed as it is with new features, I hope youll enjoy reading it. May it be a valuable addition to your tech-book library.