Welcome to this book! What you will find between the covers of this book will hopefully set you on your way to producing your own iOS applications; not only that, it will also help you to start writing code that can be moved with the minimum fuss to Android and Windows 8 mobile phones and tablets. Hold on to your hats folks!
Chapter 1, Installing the Xamarin Product Range for Android and iOS, explains how to set up your PC or Mac to develop apps for your iOS device.
Chapter 2, The User Interface, deals with creating a user interface and its key components.
Chapter 3, Views and Layouts, explains how creating a user interface isn't just about putting buttons on a screen; you also need to start with the right application type.
Chapter 4, Controllers, gives the basics of the two most used forms of Navigation and View. iOS uses an MVC system (Model, View, Controller). We've had the first two, now let's see about controllers.
Chapter 5, UI Controls, explains how the controls are more than just buttons and textboxes; we can really go to town on how these bad boys look.
Chapter 6, Events, explains how, without events, your iOS device is nothing more than a lump of plastic. iOS is rich in events, and they're all here.
Chapter 7, Gestures, covers the operations that iOS makes a big play on, such as being able to pinch, sweep, and move around the screen. These operations are called gestures and they're very simple to use!
Chapter 8, Threading, deals with iOS as a multithreaded system. How these threads interact determines how an app will behave.
Chapter 9, Threading Tasks, deals with task scheduling as well as asynchronous tasks. It explains how Android works with these tasks.
Chapter 10, Animation, gives an insight into animation, as it is an important part of any app.
Chapter 11, Handling Data, explains how it is surprisingly easy to handle and manipulate large amounts of complex data within C# and iOS.
Chapter 12, Peripherals, explains how to code to take advantage of the calling and texting feature on your phone as well as use the GPS system.
Chapter 13, User Preferences, explains how to store your settings for the built-in system as well as create your own cross-platform settings code. Storing your settings is a very important part of any app.
Chapter 14, Testing and Publishing, deals with how to test and publish the app after you have finished developing it.
A Mac (running OS.X Lion or Mountain Lion) with Xcode installed and a copy of Xamarin.iOS (you can use the free download version from www.xamarin.com). If you're using a PC, you'll need to be running Windows 7. It will need a Mac somewhere on the network to deploy and use Xcode from.
An iPhone or iPad is also useful.
This book is for those who already code in C#; it is the basic assumption used. You need not have ever written anything for a mobile device or have coded in Objective C. If you're interested in developing code for iOS, then you're in the right place.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "A UIImageView has no events attached to it, so if you need an image that can be clicked on, they can be planted onto a UIButton class "
A block of code is set as follows:
var r = new UIButton();
r.Frame = new RectangleF(0, 0, 100f, 100f);// button 100 x 100 at 0, 0
var i = new UIImageView(new RectangleF(15f, 2f, 70f, 70f));
i.Image = UIImage.FromFile("path/toimage.png")Scale(new SizeF(70f, 70f));
var l = new UILabel(new RectangleF(2f, 78f, 96f, 20f));
l.Text = "Hello world";
r.AddSubview(i);
r.AddSubview(l);New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The class needs to be defined in the connector as both an outlet and action (with the Event selected to be Value Changed)."
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