I’m a newbie to iOS development and working on my first app for the iPhone and later wanted to convert it to iPad making it a universal app. I have couple of questions though:
a. Is it better to begin with universal or it shouldn’t matter?. How difficult is it to convert to a universal app?. For testing, I tried to add a new View controller both for iPhone and iPad on xode 4.2 and it looks like selecting “Targeted for iPad” doesn’t include iPhone specific view controllers and unchecking it doesn’t include one for iPad. How would I add support for both the devices if I wanted to go thru the universal route from scratch?
b. I’m targeting iOS 4 and above and also all revisions of iPhone including 5 and iPad including mini. I have couple of png files in the app that I’m using for buttons and also for the other Apple required png files. I couldn’t find documentation for what needs to be done when supporting iPhone 5 since it has a 4 inch screen. Also, do the images have be done separately for iPad too as the screen real estate is bigger?. Can somebody please explain or point me to some links that educate me on this?
c. I’m not using Storyboards but wanted to use ARC. Is ARC supported also on devices that are running on iOS 4.0?
d. While I’m developing my app, I wanted to start and be ready with the registration, provisioning and other required processes. Can somebody explain me what are the pre-requisites that I should do now to save time?
e. I have a iPhone 4S and may upgrade to the next iPhone (beyond iPhone 5). When I provision my 4S now, can I easily transfer the developer license to my next iPhone or have to repurchase the developer license again?
f. Is there a good site that walks me thru on creating launch images, spotlight, iTunes icons etc from scratch?
Thanks.
Here are the answers as far as I know:
a. If you have not been working for too long on this project, create a new universal one and then copy your code to it.
b. you can use any image format. Most of the formats are acceptable by xcode. Yes you have to have different images for iPad and iPhone. I would create some images for iPad and it would resize for iPad mini. Same thing for iPhone 5 and 4s.
C. ARC was introduced in iOS 5 so may not be available for iOS 4.
D. No special req’s as far as I know other that the fee of 99$ to apple.
E. when you get your iPhone 5 just connect it to xcode and it will reload your profile to the phone for you.
F. Apple developer program has a ton of technical doc’s available along with many sample apps or the same reason. Go to developers site on apple and you’ll be surprised of how much you can learn from those docs. We all have been through this. 🙂
Hope the above answers are helpful my friend.