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 …
For reading ease and visual accessibility you should be using dynamic fonts whenever possible. Let's look at an example you can get from the download files. I've run the Split View Controller from a previous tip in landscape on an iPad Pro 9.7 inch. Take a look at the labels on the table. They are …
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 …
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"
Special characters like emoji, accents, and symbols in your strings are easier to get than you think. This week, we'll talk about how using Unicode characters in Swift Strings. Open the exercise file and you'll find a project which we'll use for this. I just hooked up a label to make a big display of …
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 …
You've seen other apps rotate views, but you may have no idea how to do it yourself. Let me show you one way to rotate views. We'll make a simple knob control you might be able to use in your apps. Download the example file. On the storyboard, I added an UIImageView of a knob …
You've probably seen menus that pop out of the side of an app, but do you know how to make one? With the knowledge of some simple code you too can add these to your application using auto layout. If you take a look at the example file, I've set up a storyboard for you. …
