Online Resources to Get Started with iOS 8 Development

Apple has officially announced that iOS 8 will ship on September 17. During the months since its announcement at WWDC 2014, the number of online resources to get started with iOS 8 development has grown significantly. Here you can find a selection of resources that will guide you through iOS 8 new features and frameworks.

Introduction to new iOS 8 features

• Apple's developer portal

  The starting point for all in-depth knowledge about iOS 8 is definitely Apple's developer portal. There, you will find videos, introductory guides, and reference guides for all new frameworks and APIs.

• InfoQ's introduction to iOS 8

  An brief overview of the most important APIs and capabilities added to iOS 8.

• Apple's WWDC 2014 Session Videos

  WWDC presentation are often the best way to get a deep insight into new features of Apple OSes, and iOS 8 is no exception. Available content goes from "what's new" kind of presentations, to advanced material covering CloudKit, Swift, Handoff, debugging, adaptive UI, without forgetting introductions to all iOS 8 new frameworks, such as HealthKit, HomeKit, modern WebKit API, etc. With over 80 session videos available, the list is far too long to give here. Though, a few highlights for a quick start in iOS 8 new features are:

  • Introducing CloudKit
  • Introducing HealthKit
  • Introducing HomeKit
  • Introducing the Modern WebKit API
  • Working with Metal: Overview
  • What's New in Xcode 6

  If you prefer reading than watching videos, a great resource is asciiwwdc, which offer transcripts of WWDC presentations that could be used as companions to the PDFs hosted on Apple's WWDC site.

• iOS 8 day-by-day

  A great collection of tutorials by Sam Davis, who continues the work he started for iOS 7. This new collection, besides covering the new high-level frameworks, also presents more detailed topics that are to become relevant to developers that want to target iOS 8 and take full advantages of its new capabilities. Not-to-miss tutorials are those dedicated to UIVisualEffects, Auto-sizing table view cells, Adaptive Layout, Rotation, CoreImage Kernels, among the others.

• Online resources to learn Swift

  Another InfoQ collection of online resources to get started with the new Apple's language. [Updated on September, 10 2014].

• NSHipster's guide to iOS 8

  "A look beneath the headline features, and share some of the more obscure APIs that everyone should know about."

Samples

At WWDC, Apple provided a lot of Xcode projects showing how to implement the latest iOS 8 features. A few highlights are (a Developer account is required):

• AdaptivePhotos: An Adaptive Application
• CloudKit Atlas: An Introduction to CloudKit
• Fit: Store and Retrieve HealthKit Data
• ImageInverter: Creating Action Extensions
• Lister: A Productivity App Built in Swift
• Sample Photo Editing Extension

In-depth material

• Explaining iOS 8’s extensions: Opening the platform while keeping it secure

  Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham breaks down how iOS 8 extensions work, what they do, and "how Apple is continuing to balance third-party access to the operating system with security."

• App Extensions for iOS 8 in Depth

  A somewhat shorter review of Extensions architecture from InfoQ.

• iOS 8 Custom Keyboard Swift Tutorial

  A tutorial which will guide you through the process of creating a minimal emoticon keyboard.

• NSHipster's WKWeb​View guide

  "WKWebView is the centerpiece of the modern WebKit API introduced in iOS 8 & Mac OS X Yosemite. It replaces UIWebView in UIKit and WebView in AppKit, offering a consistent API across the two platforms."

• Interoperating between Swift and an Existing Objective-C Code Base

  If you have a project written in Objective-C, you can start adding Swift classes to your code. This tutorial will get you started in connecting your Swift and Objective-C code to each other.

• Ars Technica Handoff Introduction

  What Continuity/Handoff works and how developers can integrate Handoff support into their own iOS and OS X applications. Also relevant is Apple documentation.

• Ray Wenderlich's Metal Intro

  An introduction to some of the most important classes in Metal, such as devices, command queues, and more through a simple app that draws a triangle.

• Moving your apps form parse to CloudKit

  A SlideShare presentation by Genady Okrain showing how you can use CloudKit as a BaaS replacement for parse.com, including pros and cons analysis.