Category: Swift Swift

• November 4, 2015

  How to Make Xib-Based Custom UIImagePickerController Cameras in Swift

  Apps with Cameras are cool. Most of us do not have the time to spend writing the code to use AVFoundation to get a camera app. For most uses, the UIImagePickerController is a much better option for a camera. While a handy camera API, it is often limited in its out of the box incarnation. […]
• October 28, 2015

  Why Stack Views Are Your Best Friend If You Hate Auto Layout

  

  If you hate auto layout, you may be surprised to learn Apple does too. In Xcode 7 Apple introduced a new way to work with constraints called stack views. Stacks are containers that keep views aligned automatically. Originally announced as a lazy man’s auto layout, you do need to understand auto layout to use it […]
• October 21, 2015

  Why your Web View Doesn’t Work in iOS9 — and what to do about it

  While updating my tutorial for UIWebView I came across a problem I had heard about but had not experienced. I had even heard a claim that a lot of apps are broken or rejected because of this. Apple has increased security on web accesses, and it does crash a web view rather quickly. I’m going […]
• October 6, 2015

  How to Make Drill-Down Tables in Swift

  Table views are a lot like potato chips: You can’t have just one. Often, table views relate to each other in what is often referred to as a drill-down. Drill downs typically take the selected data and provide another list in a table about the selection. It creates a hierarchical selection. You might have a […]
• June 3, 2015

  Swift Watchkit: Working with Modal Views Part 1: Segue with a Delegate

  Modal views on iPhones and ipads are used for input of information that requires attention. One of the on the Apple Watch is a modal view. You cannot mix a page-based interface with a hierarchical (i.e. navigation) interface as we learned in previous lessons. You can use modal interfaces with either.  In this series of […]
• May 27, 2015

  Swift WatchKit: Introducing Navigation to the Apple Watch(Part 3: Using Delegates and Contexts)

  In our last lesson we set up navigation in the Storyboard and programmatically. We left off with passing data from one view controller to another using the context parameter like this: We made a context variable which we passed to the destination controller. We haven’t done anything yet with the value of the context. In […]
• May 19, 2015

  Swift Swift: How to Make a Drop Shadow in User Interfaces

  Flat User interfaces are a lie. They are not completely flat. One effect continues to be used with them to show depth: Shadows. In flat interfaces it can look like there are some views floating above others by the use of shadows. In this lesson we’ll learn to make shadows using the CALayer found in […]
• May 3, 2015

  Swift Swift: Making Background Images, Small Images and Custom UIViews with Autolayout

  For those who have worked a bit with auto layout, there are two topics that seems to be a real challenge: using a custom UIView, especially when using Core Graphics , and displaying photos  either in the foreground or as a background. Both suffer from similar problems. When changing device or changing orientations they are […]
• April 24, 2015

  Swift Swift: Using NSTimer to Make a Timer or Alarm

  With the launch of the Apple Watch it’s time for timers in iOS and WatchKit. Learning to use timers is a very important skill for most developers. There are many places we need to schedule regular intervals of time to do things. In my WatchKit series I’m writing a workout interval timer which tells the […]
• April 9, 2015

  Swift Swift: View Controllers Now Available for iBooks

  It was hard to tell if the cheers of joy or cries of fear were louder when Swift was announced, the next generation programming language to provide rapid development and more error free code than its predecessor Objective-C. There is nothing to fear. Grabbing the best from many different languages Swift makes for a completely […]