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iOS

Help with my basic app idea

Hey all. So as I am progressing through treehouse I want to start on my own basic project.

I want to build an app that helps students correctly reference their resources in their essays.

It would be a simple two view app. The first view would be like a search form, where the user can select what referencing style (APA, footnotes, endnotes etc), type of resource (book, article, journal etc), and the author details (One author, two authors, no author etc) and then a search button.

On hitting search the user would be taken to a results screen where based on their results it would give a detailed example of how to reference that resource.

How should I start this app? Any tips or hints would be great :)

1 Answer

Write it all down. Plan at a very high level. You can jump right into the code and it will usually turn out ok but for me personally I'm more efficient when I have a plan for what I want to do. You have a good start here at the highest level. Now take it down another level. What properties and methods do you need? So I would think you would want a UIPickerView for each of the items you want the user to be able to select. Then you need a method that will take the data selected in this view controller and will present a new view controller with an example based on the selections of the user.

Basically I do something like this with all my apps until I feel like I have enough of a plan that I can efficiently begin coding with the help of my planning document. You can be as abstract or specific as you need to be so that you will understand what properties and methods to create.

This will serve you well for any coding. You can also do some research on a thing called a UML diagram. They are very helpful if you have trouble trying to pull methods and properties out of your head on the fly or if seeing things in paragraph form doesn't help you comprehend much better.