I love the animated emoji on the apple watch. However I didn’t talk about it when I did the text input video for The Apple watchOS 4 App Development Essential Training, so here’s my chance to correct that. There’s some good news and bad news about implementation of this fun feature. The good news is …
A Developer Preview of WWDC 2018
We are once again getting close to the time for Apple’s World Wide Developers conference, and like every year, the press is busy trying to predict and preview what is ahead for the first week in June. Once again, they will completely miss the point or get it totally wrong. The WWDC is a place …
Apple Pencil Basics
The Apple pencil adds more functionality to tablets than finger touch, even though you use the same code. Let’s do a quick explore of the Apple Pencil, and see how easy it is to add support in your app. Download the starter app. It’s a Swift playground I’ll be using on my iPad so I …
Tip: Update an Old App
You’ve probably had it happen to you. You find a project on GitHub in Swift 3 you want to look at or update. You might have an old project Apple is urging you to update or kick out of the app store.. There were a few changes in Swift 4 and Xcode 9 that make …
Tip: Tap A Map
Most map applications let you select a point on the map. However, touching a map usually is only for moving a map around. You might want to get a coordinate at a user’s tap. In this tip, I’ll show you how to get the coordinate, and place a marker there. Download the starter file and …
Tip: Deep Dive into Any? Dictionaries
In many factory methods, you’ll find parameters with type Any? like this: userInfo parameters in iOS and context in watchOS use these. You can place anything there, but most often, you’ll use a dictionary of type [String:Any]. This is a great way of moving multiple values from one method to another without making a class …
Bug Workaround: Swift Playgrounds for iPad
While doing some work on more material for the site in Swift playgrounds, I ran into a serious bug in the Swift Playgrounds for iPad. I made a short video to tell you're about it, and I've included an extended transcript afterwards. Hello Folks this is Steve from the iOS Development Tips Weekly series on …
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Tip: Hex Colors
There’s lot of ways to represent colors. Crayons have names like Sea Green and Peach. I used these two colors since I'm color blind and they once got me in serious trouble when I was young. I and many with color blindness can't tell them apart easily. Knowing some other identifying system is critical in describing …
Tips: Why use UInt8
While you usually use an integer for counting, indexing and some math, there’s also its pure binary form the unsigned integer UInt. Let’s look at what you can do with an unsigned integer. Open up a blank swift playground named Unsigned Integer. Delete what’s there. Declare a variable as a UInt8 with the value 1. …
Tip: Image Literals
iOS Development tips weekly is a series you can find at the Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning libraries. The first week of a week's tip will be available for free. After that, you will need a subscription to get access to it. Click the image at left to view. You'll find an amended transcript below. You’ve …
