Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
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. …
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 …
Note:You can find a video of this tip here on LinkedIn Learning If there's one thing in auto layout that drives me nuts it is laying out for landscape different than portrait on an iPad. Phones are easy since the class sizes are different for portrait and landscape. For all phones, if I have a …
Continue reading "Layout iPad Landscape and Multitasking Apps"
In the good old days, Apple used a lot of rounded corner buttons. Many developers use several images to get the effect of round buttons. The CALayer of UIButton does have a feature for you to easily get rounded corners, and even circular buttons. Download the code from GitHub and open the starter file. It …
You'll often want default settings that users can change. iOS provides the settings bundle for storing this information. Let's look at how to use the settings bundle. Download the starter example file. I created a project which eventually will display the user's default pizza. We'll finish the code to add that pizza. To add a …
