Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
Apple packed a lot of sensors into the small packages that are iOS devices. You as a developer can detect movement in three dimensions, acceleration, rotations, and impact and use those in your applications. All of this brought to your application in the CoreMotion framework. CoreMotion has many uses. Game developers use it to make a phone into …
Continue reading "Introducing Core Motion: Make A Pedometer"
About two years ago someone asked me a very good question: Why do we need delegates for UIViewControllers? He thought Swift made things easier, but this delegate stuff seems very complicated. Shouldn't we be able to send a message or initializer between classes? When I first learned iOS, I'll admit it took me months to …
Continue reading "Why do we need Delegates in iOS and WatchOS?"
How does the Apple Watch communicate to the user when they are not looking at the watch face? That is done with haptics. Haptics are sounds and taps letting the user know something is happening. In this lesson, I'll explain to you how to use haptics in Watch OS applications by creating a catalog of all the haptics …
Continue reading "Make a WatchOS 3 Haptic Catalog with a Picker"
[Updated for WatchOS5 Beta 6/22/18] On the Apple Watch, the digital crown seems to be a great way to control your watch. the Slider and picker controls do use it, but direct developer use was prohibited in Watch OS2. In a nice change, Watch OS3 does. In this lesson, we'll show how to get data …
Even if you never want to make an app for the Apple Watch, there's one place you might want to think about supporting: Notifications. In a previous lesson, we explored how to make local notifications for iOS devices. That lesson ended with a free bonus: If a phone is sleeping and you have an Apple …
Continue reading "Adding Actions to iOS and WatchOS Local Notifications"
In last week's tutorial of this series, we made a simple dynamic table for the Apple Watch and demonstrated static scrolling tables.Based on some running pace data, we displayed the pace I ran at the mile splits. Many apps will need more than what we discussed. Apps might navigate from the table, insert and delete …
One of the most powerful and important controls on both wearable and mobile devices are table views. Table views come in two flavors: static and dynamic. Dynamic table views read data from a collection type and displays it. Static tables allow for a vertical scroll view with a set of controls. Static table views are …
It's rare to have a one controller application, even in something as small as the Apple watch. Multiple View Controllers, or Interface Controllers as they are called in WatchKit, need ways to move between controllers. WatchOS2 has a simplified version of the iOS navigation types. In this lesson we'll explore these three types of navigation …
It is a myth that using apps on an Apple watch requires a phone. This was true of Watch OS1, but not true of its successor OS. Granted, you still need a phone to load apps, but standalone apps are possible. With the introduction of WatchOS2, this becomes easier as the watch is less dependent …
In the last lesson we created a multi-row table. However, we can only view the table, not select from the table. Multi-row tables provide some challenges with selection. Along the way, we'll make a new interface to display selected information, using a technique we have not yet covered in this series: A dictionary as a …
Continue reading "Swift WatchKit: Selecting With Multiple Rows in Apple Watch"
