Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
A video of this tip can be found on LinkedIn Learning User Interfaces often use shadows to make them look less flat, but it isn't obvious how to add one to a view on your app. In this tip, I’ll show you how to make shadows using the CALayer found in UIViews, and a few …
In the good old days, Apple used a lot of rounded corner buttons. Many developers use several images to get the effect of round buttons. The CALayer of UIButton does have a feature for you to easily get rounded corners, and even circular buttons. Download the code from GitHub and open the starter file. It …
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 …
iOS Development tips weekly is a series you can find at the Lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning libraries. The first week of a week's tip will be available for free. After that, you will need a subscription to get access to it. Click the image at left to view. You'll find an amended transcript below. You’ve …
A few months ago, Apple threw out my app Interval Runcalc for being too old. While it wasn't the most innovative, complex or profitable, it was an app I used frequently myself. It was a calculator for time, pace and distance for running not only for straight runs but for the run/walk/run community who use multiple-speed …
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 …
Continue reading "Swift WatchKit: Adding Text, Dictation, and Emoji Input to Apple Watch "
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 …
Continue reading "Swift Swift: Using NSTimer to Make a Timer or Alarm"
[Updated to Swift 2.0/iOS9.0 9/18/15 SJL - errors corrected 11/20/15] I'm color blind, and that makes me a very good person to teach you about color and UIColor. I've painted for many years and my color blindness does not detract but actually helps me pick colors. These two examples, one a water-color of mine from …
Continue reading "Swift Swift: Using Color and UIColor in Swift Part 1: RGB"
Over the last few posts we've made a clock and stopwatch application in Sprite Kit. Last time, we added an animated button display for the stopwatch. This time we get the stopwatch buttons working. Get Our Variables in Order We will use several variables in our changes. Change our variables to the following: We changed …
Continue reading "Living without Storyboards: Make a Working Stopwatch in Sprite Kit"
In the clock app so far, we have a date and a time. We can switch between them by tapping the screen of our phone. Most apps use a button for this, and it's time we added our first button. Our app will now change to a stopwatch mode when we press the button. Re-position …
Continue reading "Make a Clock In Sprite Kit: Adding a Button for a Stopwatch"
