Category: Swift

• July 8, 2015

  Swift Watchkit: Adding Context Menus

  Menus are cool. Since the first interactive program, there have been menus in applications. The Apple Watch is no exception, but has no space to put a menu. To solve this problem, Apple uses the new force touch gesture to pop open a menu. You can make your own menu, with customized icons and captions.…
• June 18, 2015

  Swift WatchKit: Adding Text, Dictation, and Emoji Input to Apple Watch 

  Sometimes Apple gives away stuff you can get very happy about — like a chance to use voice dictation. If you have had a chance to play with an Apple Watch, the watch has a simple but great way to deal with text messages. If you get a text message, you can hit reply and…
• June 15, 2015

  Swift Watchkit: Working With Modal Views Part 3: Modal Page Views

  Apple’s  documentation for WatchKit  is quite clear, even when it is lying. The documentation states you can have  hierarchical navigation or page navigation but not both. Here’s is where it lies:  you can have a page-based navigation as part of a hierarchical navigation scheme. There is a special modal view version of page views, which…
• June 10, 2015

  Swift WatchKit: Working with Modal Views Part 2: Presenting Programmatically

  In the first part in this series we implemented a modal interface in WatchKit with a segue. In this part we’ll present the modal programmatically and once again set up a delegate and context for moving data between controllers. Open the project from the last lesson.  Press Command-N and add a new Cocoa Touch class …
• 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…
• April 20, 2015

  Swift WatchKit Tutorial: Coding Timers and NSTimer on Apple Watch

  There is a horrible secret  in WatchKit with many implications for those programming for the Apple watch.  There is also a secret many people do not get about Apple’s corporate address. There two secrets are interestingly related.  In WatchKit, There are no properties in the controls — you do everything with a method. This is…
• February 25, 2015

  The Joys of Beta Swift: as Versus as! and Why I Avoid Betas

  It came to my attention this week there’s a big change to Swift code on the way. It doesn’t look big though: it is the difference between as and as!. The keyword as is the conversion operator. Usually type or class are easily defined like this: But there are times you get things like this…
• February 17, 2015

  Create Dynamic and Static Table Views in Swift 3

  In an early post on this site, I wrote a table view tutorial. I decided to update that tutorial a bit for The Swift Swift View Controllers Book and add a bit more sophistication and depth. This tutorial deep dives in the subject. Both will remain on the site. In October 2016 I updated this for…