Category: Swift
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Fix Stack View Disasters
Learn how to take a disaster of nested stack views and untangle it into a great user interface.
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Draw Paths in UIViews
In a previous tip, I drew rectangles and circles in a UIView. This time, let’s add lines and curves using paths to draw some toast. Download the playground I set up for you. I set up my code to do all the drawing in the drawLines method. Go to the closure. I set up a…
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Use the Speech Synthesizer
It’s sometimes nice to add a little sound to your applications, and even better to add a voice. Outside Siri, you can use a cool and simple AVFoundation API to make iOS devices talk. Let’s learn how to use the Speech synthesizer. Download the starter file. I’ve made an app for you that has a…
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Animate With a Map Camera
In an earlier tip, I showed you how to make a map in iPad Playgrounds. Let’s learn how to animate those maps, doing a flyover of Michigan avenue in Chicago from The former home of Chess Records at 2120 South Michigan Avenue (immortalized in the Rolling Stones song) and past Grant park to North Avenue…
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Date and Time in iOS
The song says time is on my side, but I sometimes I wonder about that when trying to work with the time types in iOS. Let me show you some of the time types. In Xcode, Open up a blank playground. There are two primary types for working with time: TimeInterval and Date. Add this…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Make App Pie 