What We’ve Learned

In this chapter, we’ve gotten out of the playground and into real app development. We created a new project in Xcode and looked at how its various parts are organized in the Xcode window.

Next, we turned our attention to the user interface, since the best practice for iOS development is to start with the UI and then build out the logic and behavior behind it. Our UI is absolutely barebones at this point, but even this is enough to make us come to grips with the differing sizes and shapes of iOS devices, and what happens when the user rotates the iPad or iPhone. To deal with this, we applied autolayout constraints to our UI elements, so they put themselves in sensible places depending on how much room they have to work with.

This chapter was a short diversion from our adventures in Swift in the first three chapters, and now it’s time to bring it all together. In the next chapter, we will connect the UI we’ve built in this chapter to new code we’ll write, to make our buttons and other UI elements do their thing.