Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
One of those difficult things for even experienced developers to understand is Automatic Reference Counting, or ARC. It is how Swift manages and conserves memory automatically. Take a look at the Exercise file. I have a playground in this project with two classes. One is a pizza topping. One is a Pizza. Look at the …
You'll find closures throughout the API's, but you may not know how to use them properly. Let's take a basic tour of closures. Download the exercise file, and you'll find a project with a playground. In the playground you'll find a function to compute a pizza volume. That's for a round pan pizza, for a …
Ducking has nothing to do with waterfowl. Sometimes you’ll want to add sound to your app, but the user will be using the music or others app along with your app. For that, you’ll want to slightly lower the volume of the background music so you can put your sounds in the foreground. That;’s ducking, …
Sometimes table views could use a few buttons. There's two delegates which create swipe buttons on table view cells. Let's learn how you can implement these buttons and an interesting hidden feature you can do with them. There is two delegate methods, one for the leading swipe configuration and one for the trailing Swipe configuration. …
There's many ways to handle errors in Swift. For some errors, using throws is a great way to handle errors without crashing the system. Download the exercise file. You'll find a project with an embedded playground. While there's a lot better ways to do this, I'll use an example of a function coffee(name:) that finds …
In many popular programming languages strings are little more than an array of characters, often referred to as C strings since C was one of the first languages to take this approach to strings. As we learned in the last post, with Swift's use of Unicode characters in extentended grapheme clusters, this gets messed up, …
Continue reading "Swift Strings Are Not C Strings or NSStrings"
Special characters like emoji, accents, and symbols in your strings are easier to get than you think. This week, we'll talk about how using Unicode characters in Swift Strings. Open the exercise file and you'll find a project which we'll use for this. I just hooked up a label to make a big display of …
You’ve probably used ranges in loops, without knowing it, but ranges are really a type in Swift. Have you ever thought about ranges and all their power? I’ll show you a few things you might want to know about Swift ranges. I've put a playground into a Project for an exercise file. I added there an …
You've probably used the Segmented control before like this one It's great for some simple uses but lacks flexibility. Besides using only text or single color icon, it doesn't work in vertical or other arrangements. Let's look at another solution: Using Button arrays. In the exercise files, I've set up for you a vertical stack …
Continue reading "Replace Segmented Controls with Button Arrays"
One of the really cool features of the App development process is getting real users to beta test your app. iOS has a great way to do this with the test flight app. This week, I'll summarize the steps to set up Test Flight for your app to beta test. I'll be using my own …
