Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
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 …
Learn how to use haptics to give phone vibrations and physical sensation to your iPhone apps.
Learn how to take a disaster of nested stack views and untangle it into a great user interface.
You've seen other apps rotate views, but you may have no idea how to do it yourself. Let me show you one way to rotate views. We'll make a simple knob control you might be able to use in your apps. Download the example file. On the storyboard, I added an UIImageView of a knob …
In the last tip, I showed you how to use UIPickerControllers to make a time interval input. What I didn't show you is how to output that. In this tip I'll show you how to read and convert data from a picker that has a separate delegate. If you download the exercise file, you'll have …
Continue reading "Time Picker Part 2: Strings to Time Intervals"
