Adventures in Swift and iOS App Development
We are once again getting close to the time for Apple’s World Wide Developers conference, and like every year, the press is busy trying to predict and preview what is ahead for the first week in June. Once again, they will completely miss the point or get it totally wrong. The WWDC is a place …
Apple packed a lot of sensors into the small packages that are iOS devices. You as a developer can detect movement in three dimensions, acceleration, rotations, and impact and use those in your applications. All of this brought to your application in the CoreMotion framework. CoreMotion has many uses. Game developers use it to make a phone into …
Continue reading "Introducing Core Motion: Make A Pedometer"
About two years ago someone asked me a very good question: Why do we need delegates for UIViewControllers? He thought Swift made things easier, but this delegate stuff seems very complicated. Shouldn't we be able to send a message or initializer between classes? When I first learned iOS, I'll admit it took me months to …
Continue reading "Why do we need Delegates in iOS and WatchOS?"
One of the most powerful and important controls on both wearable and mobile devices are table views. Table views come in two flavors: static and dynamic. Dynamic table views read data from a collection type and displays it. Static tables allow for a vertical scroll view with a set of controls. Static table views are …
It's rare to have a one controller application, even in something as small as the Apple watch. Multiple View Controllers, or Interface Controllers as they are called in WatchKit, need ways to move between controllers. WatchOS2 has a simplified version of the iOS navigation types. In this lesson we'll explore these three types of navigation …
There's a legacy from WatchOS1 which is not only frustrating but deceptive. While one would think that a watch would have easy to use built in timers, that is far from the case. WatchOS2 changed this situation slightly, but still makes timekeeping not as easy as one would think. There is a timer in WatchKit, …
Continue reading "How to Use Watch Timers and NSTimers in WatchOS2 and Swift"
In the last lesson we created a multi-row table. However, we can only view the table, not select from the table. Multi-row tables provide some challenges with selection. Along the way, we'll make a new interface to display selected information, using a technique we have not yet covered in this series: A dictionary as a …
Continue reading "Swift WatchKit: Selecting With Multiple Rows in Apple Watch"
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. …
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"
In case you did not hear about the WWDC15 keynote, Apple announced that WatchKit is now part of WatchOS2, implemented in the Xcode 7 beta. WatchOS2 has several major differences to WatchKit, most importantly native execution of apps on the watch. For the watchkit lessons I've been posting, I'm assuming watchkit 1, and will not …
