Introduction to iPad iOS 5 Development Essentials
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On August 18, 2011 Hewlett Packard announced plans to overhaul its entire business strategy and begin steps to exit the PC business. This announcement was not entirely unexpected, especially given the continued decline in margins for PCs and laptops combined with the erosion of sales growth caused by the popularity of smartphones and tablets.
The truly surprising announcement that day, however, was that HP would be also discontinuing the WebOS based TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphone range. This announcement was surprising in part because less that 12 months had passed since HP paid $1.2 billion to buy Palm, Inc. in order to acquire the Pre smartphone and WebOS platforms. The issue that most startled the media and industry, however, was the fact that the TouchPad had at this point only been on the market for a mere six weeks. Whilst a number of factors will have contributed to HP’s exit from the tablet marketplace, the overriding factor was most likely that, in spite of a marketing budget rumored to be in excess of $150 million, the device simply could not compete with the iPad.
In early 2011 Gartner, a respected technology analysis and research company predicted that sales growth for personal computers would fall from 15.9% growth down to a much lower 10.5%. In September 2011 Gartner announced that previous estimates were proving to be overly optimistic and predicted that the year would see a global PC market growth rate of a mere 3.8%. This predicted decline in PC sales growth has been largely attributed to the surge in popularity of tablet based computers.
The concept of a tablet computer is, of course, nothing new. After all, Bill Gates demonstrated a Windows based tablet PC at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas as far back as 2001. The single event that triggered this market shift was the introduction of the iPad in April 2010. Within the first year Apple sold 15 million first generation iPad units. The iPad 2 launched in March 2011 and was sold out within the first weekend of sales in each of the countries in which it was marketed. Total sales are now believed to have exceeded 20 million units with approximately 8 million new units shipping every quarter.
When developing for the iPad it is important to understand that you are not just targeting a hardware device. In essence you are leveraging an entire ecosystem consisting of the device hardware, the iOS operating system, software development kit (SDK), iTunes platform and, perhaps most importantly, the App Store. No longer is the success of a mobile device platform a matter of simply the operating system and hardware. Instead, a platform will succeed or fail based on the ecosystem to which it belongs. Google’s understanding of the importance of the applications market, for example, has contributed significantly to the success of Android based devices. Conversely Nokia’s failure to create a successful ecosystem was cited by CEO Stephen Elop as a contributing factor to the demise of the Symbian operating system and the company’s move to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform for future Nokia smartphones.
It is also important to understand that most, if not all, the skills you learn developing iOS 5 applications for the iPad also apply to iPhone application development (a market consisting of over 160 iPhone owners, each a potential customer). The aim of this book is to teach you the skills necessary to build your own apps for the iPad. Beginning with the basics, this book provides an overview of the iPad hardware and the architecture of iOS 5. An introduction to programming in Objective-C is provided followed by an in-depth look at the design of iPad applications and user interfaces. More advanced topics such as file handling, database management, graphics drawing and animation are also covered, as are touch screen handling, gesture recognition, multitasking, iAds integration, location management, local notifications, maps, split views, camera access and video playback support.
New iOS 5 specific features are also covered in detail including page view controller implementation, the UIDocument class, iCloud based storage, Storyboard user interface design, automatic reference counting, Twitter integration and image filtering with Core Image.
iPad iOS 5 Development Essentials takes a modular approach to the subject of iPad application development with each chapter covering a self contained topic area. This makes the book both an easy to follow learning aid and an excellent reference resource.
Example Source Code
The source code and Xcode project files for the examples contained in this book are available for download at http://www.ebookfrenzy.com/code/ipadios5.zip.
Learn SwiftUI and take your iOS Development to the Next Level
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| Table of Contents | The History of iOS |
