Mobile App Design is Fashion Mobile app design moves very quickly, and with “mobile-first” thinking becoming the mantra of designers of all kinds, it is a leading indicator for design of just about everything else. So, I think it’s important to take a step back and analyze how apps are designed today. In this I…
Category: Software
The business, development, and marketplace of software
Your Parse backend was always a bad idea.
So if you haven’t heard, Facebook is shutting down Parse, the backend as a service (BaaS) that was acquired by Facebook a little while ago. Lots of developers are feeling a little lost, and even betrayed by Facebook. I tweeted this screen cap someone made from the Parse homepage before the shutdown, and it pretty…
Local Notifications in iOS 10 with Swift (Part 1)
This post has been updated for compatibility with XCode 8 and iOS 10 Local notifications are a simple way to display information to your user even when your app is in the background. They allow you to display an alert, play a sound or badge your app’s icon. Local notifications can be triggered at a scheduled time…
Local Notifications in iOS 9+ with Swift (Part 2)
This post has been updated for compatibility with XCode 8 and iOS 10 In part 1 of this series, we created a simple to-do list application that used local notifications to alert users when to-do items were overdue. This time, we’re going to build on that the project by enabling application icon badges to display the…
Should I learn Objective-C or Swift first?
“Should I learn Objective-C or Swift first?” I get asked this question a lot. Sometime’s people will also ask about learning C or C++ first. So, I want to take a moment and give you the low-down on how I feel as a professional iOS & Mac developer, six months after Swift’s introduction. If this…
Apple Watch Announced. Here’s what we know so far
Apple Watch Announced. Here’s what we know so far. This page is a work in progress. There are three versions of Apple Watch: Apple Watch Apple Watch Sport Apple Watch Edition – 18k Gold The price starts at $349, and will be available early 2015 An iPhone required to use Apple Watch The device uses…
Drawing Custom Views With Swift – Andrew VanWagoner
One of my readers, Andrew VanWagoner, decided to put together a short tutorial that follows up the iOS 8 Swift Tutorial I put together last month. So I’m sharing it here with you all! Andrew is a Senior Software Engineer working for Adobe in Lehi, Utah. You can find out more about Andrew at his…
Running Swift Scripts From The Command Line
Swift Scripts From The Command Line This post updated for Xcode 6.1 One of the great features of swift is it’s ability to be used on the command line. It’s actually really easy to do, and I’ll show you how to make an executable Swift file in this tutorial. First let’s create a new Swift…
Developing iOS 8 Apps Using Swift – Animations, Audio, and Custom Table View Cells (Part 7)
This section completely updated to reflect changes in Xcode 6.3, as of April 17, 2015 In parts 1 through 6 we went over some basics of Swift, and set up a simple example project that creates a Table View and a puts some API results from iTunes inside of them. If you haven’t read that…
Using open source iPhone app components with Cocoa Pods
For a while after the initial release of the iPhone App Store and it’s SDK, there was not much in terms of open source code to use and learn from, you can buy iPhone and take advantage of exclusive prime products. But times have changed, and these days there is a huge database of open…