Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
In earlier lessons I've shown you how to make a notification and how to manage notifications with the UserNotifications frame work. One very exciting part of the frame work is executing the app's code in the background. You don't have to open the app to do custom actions or even to input data. Using categories and …
Continue reading "Add Actions and Categories to Notification in Swift"
Have you ever wondered how to put user defined settings for your app into the settings app? Xcode can create a special property list called a settings bundle which can append the NSUserDefaults with more entries from Settings App. You'll find out in this lesson how to set up a settings bundle in your app …
In our first part of this series, we made a simple dynamic table for the Apple Watch. Based on some pace data when I ran the Hot Chocolate 15K, we displayed the pace I ran at the mile splits. In a real running app, I would not want to add or delete any of my …
Continue reading "Swift WatchKit: Selecting, Deleting and Adding Rows in an Apple Watch Table"
To state the obvious, The Apple Watch has very small screen real estate. There are times we need more screen space than is available. In iOS, there are scroll views. One subclass of scroll views are the table views. Table views come in two flavors: static and dynamic. Dynamic reads data from a collection type …
Continue reading "Swift Watchkit: Making ScrollViews and Static TableViews."
Apple's documentation for WatchKit is quite clear, even when it is lying. The documentation states you can have hierarchical navigation or page navigation but not both. Here's is where it lies: you can have a page-based navigation as part of a hierarchical navigation scheme. There is a special modal view version of page views, which …
Continue reading "Swift Watchkit: Working With Modal Views Part 3: Modal Page Views"
In the first part in this series we implemented a modal interface in WatchKit with a segue. In this part we'll present the modal programmatically and once again set up a delegate and context for moving data between controllers. Open the project from the last lesson. Press Command-N and add a new Cocoa Touch class …
Continue reading "Swift WatchKit: Working with Modal Views Part 2: Presenting Programmatically"
Modal views on iPhones and ipads are used for input of information that requires attention. One of the on the Apple Watch is a modal view. You cannot mix a page-based interface with a hierarchical (i.e. navigation) interface as we learned in previous lessons. You can use modal interfaces with either. In this series of …
Continue reading "Swift Watchkit: Working with Modal Views Part 1: Segue with a Delegate"
In our last lesson we set up navigation in the Storyboard and programmatically. We left off with passing data from one view controller to another using the context parameter like this: We made a context variable which we passed to the destination controller. We haven't done anything yet with the value of the context. In …
Apple WatchKit gives you a choice when it comes to navigation. You can be Page-based as we introduced in our last lesson. Another alternative, is hierarchical interfaces, which closely resemble navigation controllers on the phone. In this lesson, we'll introduce the hierarchical type of navigation by setting up a small app. Hierarchy Controllers Pages are …
The Simulator for WatchKit is the worst part of Xcode. It's horribly buggy, and has one particular bug that freezes or kills your running app very often. I had a hard time figuring this out, but once I found one place that discussed it, the number of people with the same issue surprised me. Apparently …
