Make App Pie

March 31, 2019

Swift Strings Are Not C Strings or NSStrings

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,…
March 27, 2019

Unicode Characters in Strings

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…
March 20, 2019

Ranges in Swift

You’ve probably used ranges in loops, without knowing it, but ranges are really a type in Swift. Have you ever thought about ranges and all their power? I’ll show you a few things you might want to know about Swift ranges. I’ve put a playground into a Project for an exercise file. I added there an…
March 13, 2019

Replace Segmented Controls with Button Arrays

You’ve probably used the Segmented control before like this one It’s great for some simple uses but lacks flexibility. Besides using only text or single color icon, it doesn’t work in vertical or other arrangements. Let’s look at another solution: Using Button arrays. In the exercise files, I’ve set up for you a vertical stack…
March 6, 2019

Use Test Flight

One of the really cool features of the App development process is getting real users to beta test your app. iOS has a great way to do this with the test flight app. This week, I’ll summarize the steps to set up Test Flight for your app to beta test. I’ll be using my own…
February 27, 2019

Using Haptics

Learn how to use haptics to give phone vibrations and physical sensation to your iPhone apps.
February 20, 2019

Fix Stack View Disasters

Learn how to take a disaster of nested stack views and untangle it into a great user interface.
February 13, 2019

Sliders as Knobs

You’ve seen other apps rotate views, but you may have no idea how to do it yourself. Let me show you one way to rotate views. We’ll make a simple knob control you might be able to use in your apps. Download the example file. On the storyboard, I added an UIImageView of a knob…
February 6, 2019

Time Picker Part 2: Strings to Time Intervals

In the last tip, I showed you how to use UIPickerControllers to make a time interval input. What I didn’t show you is how to output that. In this tip I’ll show you how to read and convert data from a picker that has a separate delegate. If you download the exercise file, you’ll have…
January 30, 2019

Protocols and Time Pickers

While there is the date components picker, sometimes you want a picker the gives a time interval in seconds. In this two-part tutorial, Let me show you how to set up one, and discuss some good uses of protocols beyondself If you download the exercise files, you’ll see I set up a project with two…