All beginnings are hard.

When I first got the idea to create and publish an iPhone app I told my husband that I’ll get there in one week. There are so many iPhone apps out there and “everyone” seems to do it, so it can’t be that hard.

First of all, I downloaded Xcode onto my Mac (OS X 10.9.4)… easy! I then went to Apple’s iOS Developer Library and started reading “Start Developing iOS Apps Today”. I skipped Setup as I already had Xcode and went straight to the Tutorial: Basics.

It was when I got to …

Take a few moments to familiarize yourself with the Xcode workspace. You’ll use the controls identified in the window below throughout the rest of this tutorial. Click different buttons to get a feel for how they work.

…and looked at this…

… that I realized that this probably wasn’t the best way to start and that I won’t have my app ready in one week.

After searching the web, most people seem to suggest to start by learning basic Objective-C first before diving into the IDE and the iOS framework.

Here’s some free resources I found online:

• Code school has a number of beginners iOS courses. It’s free to create an account and to access basic courses.
• AppCoda is a website entirely dedicated to iOS development. Lots of useful resources, including this beginners tutorial.
• Developing iOS 7 Apps for iPhone and iPad by Stanford School of Engineering. Free iTunes course. Seems to require some C language and object-oriented programming experience.

I decided to get started with code school, let’s see how I go!