Siri integration on iOS 10 – Swift Tutorial This tutorial written on June 13th, 2016 using the Xcode 8 Beta 1, and is using the Swift 3.0 toolchain. Get Xcode 8 set up for iOS 10 and Swift 3 compilation. If you have not yet downloaded Xcode 8 Beta 1, please do so here. (Optional)…
Mobile First & Declining Usability
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…
How To Migrate Your App And Protect It From Shutdowns Like Parse’s
How To Migrate Your App And Protect It From Shutdowns Like Parse’s Editor’s Note: This article is written by Reinder de Vries, indie app developer at LearnAppMaking.com. Oh no! Parse is shutting down… How do you move on? On January 28th Parse announced it will be shutting down its service. They’re winding down the done-for-you…
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…
Adding IBInspectable to a superclass in Swift
Adding IBInspectable to a UICollectionViewCell subclass One very useful feature I find is to add a IBInspectable background image to my views. In an entertainment app I’m currently building there is a designable cell that looks like this: @IBDesignableclass TrailerCollectionViewCell: MediaCollectionViewCell { @IBOutlet weak var lengthLabel: UILabel! @IBInspectable weak var bgImage: UIImage! { didSet { imgView.frame = self.bounds self.addSubview(imgView) imgView.image =…
Being Swifty with Collection View and Table View Cells
Here’s a common scenario: You have a table view or collection view that has a variety of different types of content. You want to display varying cells based on these types of content, and they’re all mixed within a single section. Pardon the stand-in art, but it looks roughly like this: In the Objective-C world,…
Developing tvOS Apps for Apple TV [Part 2]
Looking for some help building your Apple TV tvOS App? I’m available for consulting and development, contact me. This is part 2 of the tvOS tutorial. If you haven’t gone through part 1 yet, I suggest you run through that first. Adding Interactivity In the first section we created a simple TVML document with a…
Developing tvOS Apps for Apple TV [Part 1]
Here’s what you’ll have at the end of part 2 of this tutorial if you follow along: Looking for some help building your Apple TV tvOS App? I’m available for consulting and development, contact me. Apple TV Developer Tools Before we get started you’ll need the Xcode 7.1 beta, which you can download here: Download…
Objective-C Pointers and Swift 2: A Simple Guide
This post written on August 23, 2015 to be compatible with Xcode 7 Beta and Swift 2 Objective-C Pointers and Swift Reading C pointers from Swift Let’s say I have a C Int object as a Swift pointer. For example this Objective-C method would return an int pointer, or (int *) in C terminology: @interface…
List Comprehensions and Performance With Swift
This post written on August 15, 2015 to be compatible with Xcode 6 and Swift 1.2 List comprehensions provide a concise way to create lists. You can accomplish list comprehension-like operations in Swift even though list comprehensions are not mentioned in the Swift language guide. Say you want to create a list of squares, like:…