Apple

Discusses all things Mac and Apple related.

Contact: Richard Corzo. Meets the second Monday of each month, 7:00 p.m. at the DACS Resource Center.

DACS Community Forum: http://forum.dacs.org/

News and Notes

At the May meeting we started off with a question on the latest update to Little Snitch software firewall for the Mac. Now network profiles are supported so that firewall rules may be specific to a location. Some rules might only apply when you are away from your home network, for example.

Then we started a whole new topic for the Apple SIG. We’re going to explore creating an app for the iPhone or iPad using Book 1 from the iOS App Development for Non-Programmers series by Kevin J. McNeish Book 1 is subtitled Diving In and is available as an iBook for iPad or a Kindle e-book. Book 1 creates a prototype app without actually writing any Objective-C code to run the app. That comes later in Book 2.

We talked about how any app consists of an interface on the screen for the user to interact with, some control logic to determine what happens when the user interacts with the elements on the screen, and some data that represents the app’s settings or current state. For instance a weather app might show the current conditions and a forecast for a selected location, the core logic would retrieve the weather data, and the app’s data would store the current location and the user’s units of temperature preference (Farenheit versus Celsius).

We covered the first three chapters of Book 1, which included downloading the XCode development environment for your Mac. We were able to create a new project in XCode where we will build our prototype app.