Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
One dilemma you'll find when working with colors is switching between color systems. There's two you'll most often be using: the Red-Green-Blue or RGB and Hue-Saturation-Brightness or HSB. Download the Exercise file and run. It will give you the HSB value, but what if you want a RGB Value for that color? What if you …
An often ignored but rather powerful View Controller is the UISplitViewController. You can make one from a template and the storyboard, but I often skip both and do it programmatically, which is especially good when I’m prototyping in a playground. Let’s give it a try using the exercise files I've been using for the past …
Continue reading "Programmatically Add Split View Controllers"
One of the core elements of clean code is having code that is consistent with identifiers. Head to the AppDelegate. Take a look at this code from the tip from last week. I have a few problems with it. I'm not being very consistent in some of those identifiers such as the HueColorTVC and ColorTableViewController. …
One of those difficult things for even experienced developers to understand is Automatic Reference Counting, or ARC. It is how Swift manages and conserves memory automatically. Take a look at the Exercise file. I have a playground in this project with two classes. One is a pizza topping. One is a Pizza. Look at the …
You'll find closures throughout the API's, but you may not know how to use them properly. Let's take a basic tour of closures. Download the exercise file, and you'll find a project with a playground. In the playground you'll find a function to compute a pizza volume. That's for a round pan pizza, for a …
Ducking has nothing to do with waterfowl. Sometimes you’ll want to add sound to your app, but the user will be using the music or others app along with your app. For that, you’ll want to slightly lower the volume of the background music so you can put your sounds in the foreground. That;’s ducking, …
Sometimes table views could use a few buttons. There's two delegates which create swipe buttons on table view cells. Let's learn how you can implement these buttons and an interesting hidden feature you can do with them. There is two delegate methods, one for the leading swipe configuration and one for the trailing Swipe configuration. …
There's many ways to handle errors in Swift. For some errors, using throws is a great way to handle errors without crashing the system. Download the exercise file. You'll find a project with an embedded playground. While there's a lot better ways to do this, I'll use an example of a function coffee(name:) that finds …
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, …
Continue reading "Swift Strings Are Not C Strings or NSStrings"
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 …
