Week 2: Simulation and Development

Imagine you use a simulator to run an iOS app you designed on a Windows computer. Which of the following will a simulator do? Select all that apply.

Replicate the experience of different hardware or software

That’s correct. The overall goal of simulators is to replicate the experience of the original hardware or software.

Need high computing resources in order to run effectively

That’s correct. For the simulator to run effectively, you need to ensure there is enough storage space and Random Access Memory or RAM available on your machine.

Allow you to test your app without having to install them on the actual physical devices you designed them for

That’s correct. By mimicking the behavior of the mobile devices you designed your app for, the simulator will allow you to test how your apps will run on these devices without having to install them on the actual physical devices

Imitate the Apple devices your app is designed for

That’s correct. A simulator is a computer program that’s designed to simulate another kind of device.

With billions of mobile
devices around the world. The demand for and
use of mobile devices is high. As more new devices are released
to the market to meet this demand. Software engineers need
to develop apps for them. As you can imagine purchasing different
types of devices to test these apps is not practical. That’s where simulations come in. In this video,
you’ll learn more about simulators, their purpose as well as
the types of simulators available. So what exactly is a simulator? A simulator is a computer program that’s
designed to simulate another kind of device. While different types of simulators
have unique ways of operating, the overall goal remains the same. Replicating the experience
of the original hardware or software by mimicking
the behavior of mobile devices. Simulators allow you to test how your apps
will run on the devices you’ve designed them for without having to install
them on the actual physical devices. For example, if you are an Apple user and
you want to run an app specifically designed for a windows computer,
you will need to use a simulator. Simulators do, however, require high
computing resources in most cases. This means that if you are going to
use a simulator on your machine, it’s important to make sure
there’s enough storage space and random access memory or
RAM available for it to run effectively. And what types of simulators
are available to you? There are several commercial and
open source simulators available for most of the operating
systems in the market. Let’s discuss some examples,
simulators like BlueStacks allow you to run android apps on operating
systems like Mac and Windows. Appetize.io, a browser-based
emulator that allows you to use iOS applications on any PC. With Wine, you can run Windows
applications on the Linux OS. Aside from running apps,
some simulators even make gaming possible. For example, simulators like nestopia
allow you to play Nintendo games on Linux. SNES Classic console simulators,
which are standalone, allow gamers to play old video
games on modern HD televisions. Lastly, many PlayStation portable
simulators allow users to play games made for
other consoles on Sony’s mobile system. You should now have more insight
into simulator software. What simulators do and the different
types of simulators available to you. Later, you’ll learn how to configure and
create a simulator in X code. Which will allow you to
simulate your own project app.

To launch the default simulator in Xcode, which menu shortcut do you need to select?

Open Developer Tool

That’s right. To launch a simulator, you can click Xcode, then, select Open Developer Tool from the menu and then click Simulator. This launches one of the simulators by default, which you can then change to the simulator of your own choice.

Because running an
app on a simulator is much like using an app on
an actual mobile device, most developers are
turning to simulators as a tool to test and even
debug their app code. While simulators are a
safe place to test code, especially at the beginning
of the design phase, using a simulator
on a computer does require some configuration
to function properly. In this video, you will learn
exactly how to do that, configure and
launch a simulator. You can configure a
simulator with the help of the devices and simulators
feature in Xcode. More specifically, you can
specify the interaction between the development computer and the simulator
with this tool. Let’s explore how to start
a simulator and Xcode. When launching a simulator, you’ll start in the
Xcode environment, in the toolbar click Window and then select devices
and simulators. Once you click that, you will be presented with a wide range of precreated simulators that
come with the Xcode IDE. You can create your own
version if you cannot find what you need from the
list of available simulators. If you click on “Devices”
in the top-left corner, you will be presented
with a list of physical devices that have been connected to your computer. Currently, no selection is displayed as there are
no connected devices. Let’s go back to the simulators. To create your own simulator. Click the plus button at the bottom left-hand
corner of the screen. You will then be presented with another window where you
can specify the name, device type, and operating
system or OS version. For this video, Let’s
name the simulator test. You can choose a
device type from a wide range of device types, including iPhones, Apple
Watches, and iPads. Let’s leave iPhone 6S selected. For the OS version, You can choose to leave
the default is iOS 15.2, or you can click on
it and then click “Download” more
simulator runtimes. This will open another
window where you can download a wide range of
other operating systems, because iOS 15.2
works in this case, you can just close
the window for now, then click “Create”. The simulator is
now created and is available in the list of simulators on the
left-hand side, it’s worth noting
that you can connect your simulated iPhone
to an Apple Watch. For example, the iPhone
12 Pro simulator is paired to the
Apple Watch Series 5. This means that when you run an app on the iPhone 12 Pro, it’s going to simulate
the Apple Watch, so the experience you have
on an iPhone is going to run on an Apple Watch
as well as in real-time. Let’s get back to
the test simulator. You can click on it to perform various functions such as
renaming or deleting it. How can you start
your simulator? To launch a simulator, you can click the Xcode icon at the top left of the screen, then select “Open Developer Tool” and click on “Simulator”. It will launch one of the
simulators by default. With the simulator activated. To change the simulator, you can select file
followed by open simulator, and then hover over iOS 15.2. All the simulators that run
on iOS 15.2 will be listed here of which test the simulator you
created earlier is one. You can do the same
thing for tvOS, watchOS. But let’s click on “Test”. The test simulator is
coming up already, and that’s how you create and manage a simulator on Xcode. You should now know how to configure and
launch a simulator. This is an essential skill for iOS mobile app development, as you will likely
use simulations to test and debug your
own apps in future.