Learning Programming
Many iPhone apps use maps to display helpful information to the user, often showing the current location. Uses include maps for navigation, finding nearby places, adding location to notes, reminders, and so on. This short tutorial will teach us two ways to add a map to an app.
The MapKit framework makes adding a map to your app simple. You can first begin by importing MapKit into your view as follows:
import MapKit
I have written a handful of tutorials about SwiftUI, but since it was announced in 2019, I’ve done very little with it. At the end of 2019, I stepped away from iOS dev work and, for several months, worked with PHP, a custom framework, and the Laravel and Lumen frameworks to do some backend work.
In late 2020 I took a break due to an injury, and in 2021 I did some work in JavaScript, VueJS, and Python, and then moved on to C# in 2022. Mobile dev is where I prefer to work, and although I do some mobile dev work in .NET MAUI, it isn’t quite the same experience as a full native experience, in my opinion, although MAUI is actually really good. I might write about that over on my personal dev site.
[Read more…]There are two categories of notifications on iOS devices. One type is a push notification sent by a server, and the other is a local notification scheduled on-device that appears at a particular time or location.
This tutorial focuses on local notifications. An example of a local notification can be seen in your calendar. You add an appointment, set it to remind you 15 minutes before, and 15 minutes before the meeting begins, you see a notification on your lock screen. Let’s take a look at how these work.
[Read more…]When Xcode 12 was launched in 2020 it brought with it a new app life cycle for SwiftUI applications. Prior to this, SwiftUI based apps were using AppDelegate.swift and SceneDelegate.swift.
Creating a new app can be done with this code:
import SwiftUI
@main
struct MyNewApp: App {
var body: some Scene {
WindowGroup {
ContentView()
}
}
}
For the last few weeks, I have been making plans for a new iPad/iPhone, and potentially macOS application. I haven’t used SwiftUI much in development so wasn’t sure how best to sort out the navigation on both mobile devices.
The app I am building, which is in very early stages, is for note-taking and meeting planning. My plan was to use a two-column layout, much like master/detail, but it seems that one good option is the three-column layout that has a menu on the far left column, a list view in the centre column, and then details on the rest of the view, as seen below.
If you are getting an error saying that you cannot preview this file (while using SwiftUI), then perhaps like my experience, a reboot might fix it. That’s the short version to possibly get you going before reading on.
I created a new project today and switched the default ContentView.swift to use an iPad Pro 11 inch for the preview. An error appeared in right pane saying “Cannot preview in this file – Unable to boot device due to insufficient system resources”. Clicking the diagnostics button provided the following:
HumanReadableNSError: Unable to boot device due to insufficient system resources.
Please see Simulator Help for information on adjusting resource limits.
NSPOSIXErrorDomain (67):
==NSLocalizedFailureReason: The current system settings are not sufficient to allow booting additional simulators: maxFiles: 12288, openFiles: 11669, enforcedFilesBuffer: 1868
As mentioned, a reboot fixed the issue. It seems that Apple last recognised this happening back in 2017 in the Simulator Help section on the Apple help site that gives some recommendations on how to modify the number of processes and number of open files.
We recently wrote about Swift structs. In this tutorial, we’ll look at classes. Classes and structures have a lot in common, although there are some important differences. Let’s take a look at what a class is and what you use them for.
A struct, or structure, is a custom data type in Swift that allows you to add many properties to it. If you think of a regular string, you can store just one string in the variable, as follows:
var firstName = "Matthew"What if we wanted to add Matthews height:
var firstName = "Matthew"
var height = 190This rapidly becomes complicated because we now have two variables to manage and think about. Imagine if we needed to add their last name, and so on, and then have the need to pass this information somewhere else within the program. This is one benefit of using a struct.
[Read more…]The basic template for SwiftUI View begins with a simple Text view:
struct ContentView: View {
var body: some View {
Text("Hello World!")
}
}When a Text view is returned with no attributes, it is put it in the middle of the view.
[Read more…]Codable provides a way to convert to and from formats such as JSON. In this tutorial we’ll just focus on converting JSON. The JSON format is popular among web services and provides a standard about how data can be represented. JSON formatted data can be understood by various systems making it possible to easily transfer data from one system to another regardless of operating system or programming language used.
On the iOS side, Codable is one way to convert an object or structure in to the JSON format so that the other end of the network can accept it and understand it as needed.
The Gmail API is one example of a service that provides data in JSON form. When you query the API the results come back as JSON. We don’t particularly care what programming language and operating systems are involved on the other side. All we need to know is that the response provided conforms to the JSON standard and thus, we can use Codable to convert that data in to whatever we need within our code.
[Read more…]