Building Your First iOS App with JavaScript

Building Your First iOS App with JavaScript

With the increase in usage of mobile devices, web applications have become more powerful these days. In fact, many organizations considering a mobile app for the growth of their business and for improving conversion rate.

Generally, we have four ways to build a mobile app such as: 1.

2.

3.

4.

native iOS native Android PhoneGap Appcelerator Titanium

Even though we have already learned a lot in iOS development. But being a developer, we always want to develop something cool and useful. In this article, we will discuss the whole new idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript, which require significant amount of learning

as the web development industry is always changing. Also, we need to learn new languages and frameworks to meet the current requirement.

Though it's not widely known, we can write native-feeling iOS apps for the iPhone and iPad in JavaScript and package it into an executable file and distribute it accordingly across Windows, OS X and Linux.

Before we start, here are some things you should be familiar with:  JavaScript  Some ES2015 features, namely Classes, Arrow Functions, Destructuring andTemplate Strings  Mac OS X Terminal  CSS (yup!)  React (optional)

Using Xcode, you'll create an iOS project from scratch, then install third party modules and components, linking libraries, styling with flexbox, creating a custom gesture listener, and many other things. Modify the project's source code, and run your application on either the iOS Simulator or a physical device.

We take this example Unsplash which fufilles all my wallpaper needs. On the phone: Settings → Wallpaper .

1. Setting up A Blank React Native Project Make sure you have Xcode 7.0 or higher installed. It can be downloaded free from the App Store. Install Node too. Another important tool we’ll need is npm Run react-native in it SplashWalls.

This should fetch and install all the required modules and create a new folder called SplashWalls.

Notice the Deployment Info section. It has some default settings applied.

Go ahead and hit the Run button at the top-left in Xcode 2. Fetching Wallpaper Data from the API Here Unsplash.it API asking for wallpaper data.

3. Adding a Loading Screen By the end of this section we will have a loading screen show up while the JSON data is being downloaded.

4. Filtering and Picking Random Wallpapers Here, we will filter through the wallpaper data and pick specified number of random wallpapers.

5. Adding the Swiper Component Include a Swiper component in our app that will allow us to display wallpapers in a swipeable container.

Hope this article will help you learn how to build an iOS app with JavaScript and keep you updated with the hot topics in mobile application development.