Let's start the year of building apps with the dreaded tip calculator!

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Please note that the date for this meetup has changed to Tuesday, January 31st at 6:30 p.m., which is one week later than the originally scheduled date. But with this date change comes a confirmed location — Wolters Kluwer's office on North Westshore!

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“How do I make this kind of app?” It’s the question I’m asked most often during the Q&A portion of Tampa iOS Meetup. Together, we’re going to address it in the new year by making it The Year of Building Apps, and I hope you’ll join us!

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In programming, there’s a “forest vs. trees” problem.

Even simple apps make use of a number of aspects of programming, any one of which you can study in depth. You can spend days learning about iOS’ user interface controls (there’s a whole book on Auto Layout, (http://www.informit.com/store/ios-auto-layout-demystified-9780321967190) and even a book just on table views! (http://www.apress.com/us/book/9781430233480)), weeks covering the ins and outs of Core Data, (http://www.learncoredata.com/what-is-core-data/) and months on the various parts of SpriteKit (https://www.raywenderlich.com/145318/spritekit-swift-3-tutorial-beginners), and still have lots of other topics to look over.

The big challenge is taking those bits of knowledge — the trees — and applying and assembling them into an app — the forest.

Tampa iOS Meetup is going to devote its 2017 sessions to walking you through the process of turning those trees into forests. Each session will cover the building of a single app from start to finish. I’ll provide an overview of what we want the app to do, show you the iOS features, technologies, and libraries that you’ll need in order to build the app, and explain how you can bring them together to make the app a reality.

Whether you’re new to programming, or new to iOS programming, or have been learning iOS programming for a little while but are having trouble making the leap from doing tutorials to writing your own finished apps, if your new year’s resolution is to get an app in the App Store, you’ll want to come to the 2017 edition of Tampa iOS Meetup!

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We’ll kick off the first meetup of the new year with a deceptively simple app: the tip calculator.

Why “dreaded”? That’s because at its heart, it’s a relatively simple app, which means that there are so many tip calculator apps, and so many of them are downright terrible. Our goal for the meetup will be to cover the many ways to make a tip calculator app that you wouldn't be ashamed to put in your developer portfolio.

We’ll cover a number of topics in this session, including:

• User interface controls

• Animations and other visual effects

• Rounding functions

• Useful hints on the Swift programming language

• The little things that make an app feel more solid and professional

This session will be suitable for newcomers to iOS development. If you’ve done some simple JavaScript development, you shouldn’t have any problem following along. If you’re new to programming in general, but have always wanted to make an iOS app, this is an ideal first project.

You’ll come out of this session with a better understanding of the app development process, as well as source code and notes that you can use in writing your own apps.

Come join us at the Tampa iOS Meetup! Learn about iOS programming, meet your peers in the Tampa Bay area, have some fun, and take the first step to creating your own apps and putting them in the App Store!