Technology is advancing quite rapidly. Portable devices, such as media players, smartphones, and tablets, have brought huge advancements and changes in the way people communicate, share, and consume digital content. Developers need to be up-to-date with the available platforms these devices work on, if they want to be "part of the game".
iOS, Apple’s operating system for its own portable devices, is undoubtedly one of the leading portable platforms today. If it weren’t for MonoTouch, .NET developers would have to spend time to learn a new programming language to expand their creativity to the iOS ecosystem.
This book, through a series of multiple recipes and with an almost equal number of complete projects, will help you become part of this ecosystem, with the help of MonoTouch and C#. When you finish reading it, you will be a capable iOS developer, ready to unleash your creativity to one of the most popular portable platforms today.
Chapter 1, Development Tools, will walk you through all the available IDEs and SDKs that you will need for using MonoTouch for iOS development. You will create your first MonoTouch project and learn how to debug on the simulator.
Chapter 2, User Interface: Views, introduces the concept of views and how they are part of a complete iOS application. Exploring a large number of various view components, you will create different applications that will help you understand how each component works.
Chapter 3, User Interface: View Controllers, discusses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and how to use it to create applications suitable for enhanced user experience. Through this chapter, you will also learn about the most useful controllers, which will be part of many of your projects in the future, and how to create iPad-specific and universal applications.
Chapter 4, Data Management, will walk you through a series of techniques that will allow you to incorporate data management in your applications. You will learn how to use SQLite databases, XML, LINQ-to-XML, and Serialization, formerly only available to .NET desktop and web projects.
Chapter 5, Displaying Data, expands on the available components to display data effectively on the smaller-than-desktop screens of iOS devices. You will get accustomed to using the UITableView for displaying lists of data, as well as the UIWebView for HTML (and more) content.
Chapter 6, Web Services, discusses creating applications that communicate online to exchange data. With the help of MonoTouch, you will not only learn how to use common .NET and WCF web services in iOS applications, but also how to read and parse JSON objects.
Chapter 7, Multimedia Resources, will teach you to create applications that capture, reproduce, and manage multimedia content through the device’s hardware. You will not only learn to use the camera to capture images and video, but also how to play back and record audio.
Chapter 8, Integrating iOS Features, will walk you through the ways to incorporate the platform’s native applications and components. You will learn how to provide e-mail, text messaging, and address book features in your application and how to use the native calendar to create events.
Chapter 9, Interacting with Device Hardware, discusses creating applications that are fully aware of their surrounding environment, through the device’s sensors. You will learn to adjust the user interface according to device orientations and how to respond to accelerometer and gyroscope events.
Chapter 10, Location Services and Maps, is a detailed guide for using the built-in location services to create applications that provide location information to the user. You will not only learn how to use the GPS hardware, but also how to display maps and layout information.
Chapter 11, Graphics and Animation, introduces 2D graphics and animation. You will learn to animate components and create simple graphics. By the end of this chapter, you will create a small finger-drawing application.
Chapter 12, Multitasking, will walk you through the details for implementing multitasking in iOS applications, which helps enhance user experience by executing code behind the scenes.
Chapter 13, Localization, discusses providing localized content in applications. You will learn how to prepare your application to target users worldwide.
Chapter 14, Deploying, will not only walk you through the required steps to deploy your finished application to devices, but also to prepare and distribute it to the App Store.
Chapter 15, iOS 5 Features, discusses some of the many new features that were introduced with the latest iOS version, such as page-curl content navigation, split keyboard for the iPad, and styling multiple views easily.
The minimum requirement for this book is a Mac computer running Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.*) or Lion (10.7.*). Almost all projects you will create with the help of this book work on the iOS Simulator. However, some projects will require a device to work correctly. You will find all the appropriate details in Chapter 1, Development Tools.
This book is essential for C# and .NET developers with no previous experience in iOS development and Objective-C developers that want to make a transition to the benefits of MonoTouch and the C# language for creating complete, compelling iPhone, iPod, and iPad applications and deploying them to the App Store.
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: "Apple provides another base class, the UIViewController, which is responsible for managing views."
A block of code is set as follows:
public override void ViewDidLoad (){
base.ViewDidLoad();
this.myLabel.Text = "View loaded!";
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
public override void ViewDidLoad (){
base.ViewDidLoad ();
UIButton.Appearance.BackgroundColor = UIColor.Gray;
UIButton.Appearance.SetTitleColor(UIColor.White, UIControlState.Normal);
this.buttonPresent.TouchUpInside += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e) {
this.PresentModalViewController(new ModalController(), true);
} ;
}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: " Any file that is marked as Content is being copied as-is in the application bundle".
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