Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
One dilemma you'll find when working with colors is switching between color systems. There's two you'll most often be using: the Red-Green-Blue or RGB and Hue-Saturation-Brightness or HSB. Download the Exercise file and run. It will give you the HSB value, but what if you want a RGB Value for that color? What if you …
For reading ease and visual accessibility you should be using dynamic fonts whenever possible. Let's look at an example you can get from the download files. I've run the Split View Controller from a previous tip in landscape on an iPad Pro 9.7 inch. Take a look at the labels on the table. They are …
An often ignored but rather powerful View Controller is the UISplitViewController. You can make one from a template and the storyboard, but I often skip both and do it programmatically, which is especially good when I’m prototyping in a playground. Let’s give it a try using the exercise files I've been using for the past …
Continue reading "Programmatically Add Split View Controllers"
One of the core elements of clean code is having code that is consistent with identifiers. Head to the AppDelegate. Take a look at this code from the tip from last week. I have a few problems with it. I'm not being very consistent in some of those identifiers such as the HueColorTVC and ColorTableViewController. …
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 …
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 …
