Chapter 4
Building User Interfaces

We’ve had three chapters to play around with Swift. Now we’re going to come at iOS development from a completely different angle: developing the user interface.

We’ll kick things off with a little secret about iOS development, something it inherited from Mac development: Create the user interface first. This is totally backward for a lot of seasoned developers. A lot of us think through an application’s requirements and immediately start thinking of our data models and strategies and…nuh-uh. Build the UI first. Build what users are going to see, what they’re going to interact with, and start to understand how they’ll experience it. Then figure out how the heck you’re going to do that.

That philosophy is reflected in the tools provided for iOS development. If we built the user interface by writing code, it would be natural to code the functionality and then put buttons and views on top of it. Instead, the iOS SDK provides distinct tools for building the UI graphically and for coding its functionality. The tools let us see our interface first, and then make it work.

In this chapter, we’re going to start building an app that will carry us through to submitting to the App Store, which we do in the final chapter. And since iOS apps start with the user interface, that’s all we’re going to do in this chapter: we’ll familiarize ourselves with the tools for building UIs, and in the next chapter we’ll start connecting it to code.