Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
Have you ever seen some factory method in UIKit and see this strange parameter called completion or completionHandler? Usually you put nil there and leave it alone. These strange things like (Double,Double) -> Bool things are closures. Closures are functions you use as types, often in parameters of other functions. In this lesson we'll explore …
There's a lot of data out there for the taking, if you only know how to get it. There is a treasure trove of government-based data sets available to the public. There's a lot of information free for the taking you might want to know, or add to your app. There's also many different ways …
Continue reading "How to Read CSV files from the Web in Swift"
In the last lesson, we explored the joys of making maps using the UIMapView and MapKit. While showing maps is great, we often want to add things to a map, such as locations and graphics. These are known as Annotations and Overlays. In this lesson we'll make some of each. We'll start by locating pizza restaurants …
Everyone may remember when Apple first introduced MapKit to replace Google Maps on iPhones, they ended up to apologizing. However over time, developers have found how easy it is to use MapKit. This API provides features which make using both 2D and 3D maps very easy. More importantly, Google charges for map views over a …
Continue reading "How to Use MapKit for 2D and 3D Map Views."
Even if you never want to make an app for the Apple Watch, there's one place you might want to think about supporting: Notifications. In a previous lesson, we explored how to make local notifications for iOS devices. That lesson ended with a free bonus: If a phone is sleeping and you have an Apple …
Continue reading "Adding Actions to iOS and WatchOS Local Notifications"
The word notification gets a bit abused in the world of mobile development, especially in the world of Apple development. Notifications could mean internal notifications, where classes use observers to watch unrelated code. When a notification appears, the observer code executes special code for that event. Another type of notification notifies a user that something …
Ever wanted that sliding sidebar or an alert with a image picker? Apple has many great ways of presenting view controllers, but sometimes we want something different, something new. For that we subclass UIPresentationController. However there's a few concepts that you'll need to wrap your head around first. In this lesson we'll create a few …
Continue reading "The Step by Step Guide to Custom Presentation Controllers"
In last week's tutorial of this series, we made a simple dynamic table for the Apple Watch and demonstrated static scrolling tables.Based on some running pace data, we displayed the pace I ran at the mile splits. Many apps will need more than what we discussed. Apps might navigate from the table, insert and delete …
Have you ever wondered how to put user defined settings for your app into the settings app? Xcode can create a special property list called a settings bundle which can append the NSUserDefaults with more entries from Settings App. You'll find out in this lesson how to set up a settings bundle in your app …
It's rare to have a one controller application, even in something as small as the Apple watch. Multiple View Controllers, or Interface Controllers as they are called in WatchKit, need ways to move between controllers. WatchOS2 has a simplified version of the iOS navigation types. In this lesson we'll explore these three types of navigation …
