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 iOS you are limited to two labels and an image for one of the standard table view cell styles. You might want more custom cells than this. You are not alone with other developers including, Instagram, Twitter, Feedly and even Apple often using more than the basic table view cell. You can customize table view cells and populate …
This will be the first in a series of lessons on persistence in iOS applications. Persistence is keep data around even if your app ends. As we'll see in this series there are many techniques to save and read data. One Common one Apple uses frequently in Xcode is the Property list, or plist, named …
Continue reading "How to Use Property Lists (.plist) in Swift"
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. …
Apple messed up big time. They wanted a simple, powerful but flexible system to lay out buttons, labels, images and other objects on the storyboard. They wanted a way to make only one layout and have it work on any iOS device in any orientation. They created Auto Layout and Size classes. Then they messed …
Continue reading "Practical Auto Layout: Are You Ready for iOS 9?"
I have a mystery brewing. Last week I wrote an article 12 Points that the media missed at WWDC2015. An astute reader noted that #5,6,and 7 was missing. Was it a plot by Google to keep these points quiet? No, I just goofed and somehow deleted them in transferring the article. There was a lot …
Continue reading "7 More Impressions From WWDC2015 Almost Everyone Missed"
Once a year, Apple developers get together in San Francisco. Some lucky people in person, most through on-line connections. The event is the World Wide Developer's Confrence (WWDC), the event for those people and companies developing applications for OSX and iOS. As a developer, I look froward to this event every year and have a …
Continue reading "6 Themes to Expect at Apple’s WWDC 2015 No One is Talking About."
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 …
Continue reading "The Joys of Beta Swift: as Versus as! and Why I Avoid Betas"
A few weeks ago, I was talking to friend about the Stopwatch I had written in Sprite Kit. At the time I had the stopwatch working to tenths of a second. While I was discussing this stopwatch on social media, a friend of mine bragged that their stopwatch app they downloaded somewhere goes to hundredths …
