April 6th, 2014 by Blake Lucchesi
Getting up to Speed with iOS
Until I joined SendHub this past December I had only done a small bit of iOS development. The last app I shipped hadn’t been worked on for nearly 12 months and since that time iOS 7 had been released. So when I joined the team I started to look for resources I could use to get myself up to speed quickly. As helpful as a long form book can be, I tend to find that I make the most progress in learning when trying to solve real problems that face my current task at hand.
Videos and Screencasts
- WWDC and Apple Tech Talk Videos - The content presented by the Apple engineering team at these events is second to none. Regardless of whether you go to WWDC or not, watching these videos will pay instant dividends as they bring you up to speed in self-contained areas of the iOS ecosystem.
- NSScreencast.com Similar in format to the popular RailsCasts run by Ryan Bates, Ben Scheirman does a great job putting together weekly bite-sized screencasts on iOS development.
Blogs, Articles and Periodicals
- Objc.io - A great monthly publication, each a series of articles following a theme.
- NSHipster.com - Features a weekly article from Mattt Thompson who describes the site as a journal of the overlooked bits in Objective-C and Cocoa.
- SubjC.com - A recent emergence featuring in-depth walk throughs on how to recreate innovative interfaces in popular apps.
- Inessential - The blog of Brent Simmons, author of the elegant note taking/idea collecting/todo list iOS app Vesper. Brent’s blog is a bit unique in that often times his posts are thoughts on problems he is in the process of solving and so instead of presenting finished how-to’s, you get some great insight into the approach(es) he takes to solve problems.
- GitHub Explore Weekly Newsletter - See the link at the bottom to subscribe to their weekly newsletter. I’ve found a number of great Objective-c projects this way including a few from the Facebook team (Chisel and Tweaks to name a few).
- iOS Dev Weekly - A weekly newsletter that includes all things iOS and Objective-C. A great source of the freshest thoughts in the industry from all over the internets.
Question and Answer
Twitter
Twitter typically helps me find topics and thoughts from individuals that don’t have a constant stream of blog posts, and are sharing one-off gems of insight. Below is a starter list of some people I follow on the Twittersphere that have shared some great links.
Teammates and Code Review
And last but certainly not least was the collaboration of my colleagues at SendHub. A steady dose of code review is a sure fire way to share knowledge between team members. I’ll be making a point to post more about the benefits on code review in the future.
Thanks for reading! And don’t forget to share your secret sources of Objective-c delight below in the comments.