Why the shame? It's not as if iOS development is taught in grade school ;)
Anyways, yes, in fact the linked tutorial is a version of Hello World without using Apple's own VB-like visual tools and doing everything in code. It's valuable to understand what's actually going on under the hood when you touch things in Interface Builder (the visual tool used to build UIs).
Keep in mind Interface Builder is not as simple as VB, but it's a reasonable place to start if that's your background.
> "(I've heard it is a herculean effort to do something really exotic like make text both bold and underlined in label on say a title screen)"
It can be, yes. Keep in mind that iOS specifically lacks API available to regular old MacOS largely due to performance concerns. It is at the end of the day a phone. NSAttributedStrings is what you're looking for in this instance, and constructing them can still be a pain.
Anyways, yes, in fact the linked tutorial is a version of Hello World without using Apple's own VB-like visual tools and doing everything in code. It's valuable to understand what's actually going on under the hood when you touch things in Interface Builder (the visual tool used to build UIs).
Keep in mind Interface Builder is not as simple as VB, but it's a reasonable place to start if that's your background.
> "(I've heard it is a herculean effort to do something really exotic like make text both bold and underlined in label on say a title screen)"
It can be, yes. Keep in mind that iOS specifically lacks API available to regular old MacOS largely due to performance concerns. It is at the end of the day a phone. NSAttributedStrings is what you're looking for in this instance, and constructing them can still be a pain.