Learn How to Create iOS Apps
UIAlert and UIActionSheet have been replaced by UIActionViewController which now handles both.
To demonstrate both in one example I’ll make a short little tutorial showing how to fire an AlertView and also how to bring up an ActionSheet with options.
Start with a new project, single view application, Click NEXT. Select (language)Swift, (device)iPhone, and Save wherever you wish.
This will build off social sharing using UIActivityViewController. If you have not viewed that tutorial you can jump to it here. Or download the project file from where the last tutorial ended. ShareDemo.
– Add the Social Framework to the project
– Import the framework into the header file
– Add buttons for the social types we want to post to.
– Create a method to invoke sharing to the specified service type. [Read more…]
Apple makes it incredibly easy to add social sharing to your app. There are at least two ways to do this.
The first calls on the UIActivityViewController which has some built-in, behind the scenes magic. It is extremely simple and does not use a Framework.
UIActivityViewController will bring up any available sharing mechanism on the users phone. For example when the share button is touched, a view slides up with the available places to share. Mail, Messaging, Print, Photo Album etc. If the user has the Twitter or Facebook app on their phone, those icons will be presented as well.
The second way is using the Framework Social The Social Framework allows you to target specific social outlets supported by the framework.
In Xcode 6 the available outlets are:
SLServiceTypeFacebook;
SLServiceTypeTwitter;
SLServiceTypeSinaWeibo;
SLServiceTypeLinkedIn;
SLServiceTypeTencentWeibo; [Read more…]
This tutorial will focus on a Sliding Menu and implementing effects on the menu using UIKitDynamics.
UIKit Dynamics brings real world physics to objects in your app. Objects in your app like a button, an image, a table, etc. can have physics behaviors applied to them.
Used in moderation the practical application of these elements will add some polish to your app project.
UIKit Dynamics is made up of four elements;
1. A Dynamic animator
2. Dynamic behaviors(Attachment,Snap,Gravity,Collision,Push)
3. Dynamic behavior items (Allows customization of properties used in the behaviors)
4. A reference view
The Dynamic Animator groups and manages behaviors as well as the interactions on the reference view. The animator uses the reference view as the coordinate system to calculate the output of behaviors. [Read more…]
The motion effect applied to the background of your iphone is accomplished using the UIInterpolatingMotionEffect. This is a very subtle effect that simply moves an object, in this case a UIImage, along the X and Y Axis And while it doesnt have to be both the X and Y axis, moving the object along both will produce the wonderful parallax effect.
To begin with create an image which is larger than the view. In this case Ill make my image 704 X 1250 for the @2x version and 352 X 625 for the 1x version. Choose or create an image with some detail so that the movement is noticeable. If you do not have an image to hand, you can find the necessary images in the project which is linked to at the bottom of this post. Your 1x version should be named in the format of image.png and the 2x version should be called [email protected]. [Read more…]
You have probably seen a number of times an app that shows the progress of a download. Today, we’ll look at one way how this is accomplished. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a progress bar that fills up as more data is downloaded. The data we’ll download will be an image downloaded from the internet.
Lets begin by loading up Xcode and creating a Single View Application.
Call the project “Progress Bar” and leave the rest of the options as default. You can choose iPad or iPhone for this project although we’ll create it for the iPhone in this tutorial. When you get to the option on the next page asking if you want a GIT repository, you can either select or deselect it.
When the project is ready to go, load up the storyboard by clicking on Main.storyboard in the navigation pane to the left. When the storyboard loads up, you will see just a single view that is currently empty. We need to add a few objects to it which will include a progress bar and an image view. All this simple app will do is load up a pre-defined URL and as the page loads, it will show the progress of the page load and when done, it will show the item on screen. [Read more…]
In the last tutorial, we looked at the sortedArrayUsingComparator method which allows you to run a comparison on objects in an array and rearrange the objects in the array. In this tutorial we will look at a simple method which can be used to reverse the order of the contents of an array. Just be aware that this tutorial is quite brief as the code is relatively simple to use… it’s just a single line if you already have an NSArray to use.
Lets say you have 5 NSStrings which are a,b,c,d,e. When we iterate through these they will come out in the order of a,b,c,d,e. What if we want to show this information in a table view, but in reverse order? i.e., e,d,c,b,a. We do this with the reverseObjectEnumerator method of NSArray. [Read more…]
Occasionally you will come across the need to re-order the contents of an NSArray. One reason could be that you want to put the contents of an NSArray in to a table view, but in a different order to what is currently in the NSArray. This tutorial shows one way (of many) of how this can be done.
The method we will look at in this tutorial is the sortedArrayUsingComparator: which is an instance method from the NSArray class. On first looks, this can look a little complicated, but if you take time to read through and see what is happening, it begins to make perfect sense. It also makes for quite clean code too.
arrayOfObjects = [arrayOfObjects sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(id obj1, id obj2) {
}];
Update: April 2025. A new version called How to Use the Slider in SwiftUI has been posted.
The UISlider is one of the default controls/objects that you can drag in to a storyboard on Xcode. The UISlider class is part of the UIKit framework. Today, we’ll have a look at how the slider works and give an example of how it might be used in one of your applications.
Look out for our next UISlider tutorial where we’ll look more in depth at the UISlider such as setting the value rather than getting the value as well as changing the sliders appearance. The second tutorial will be added to this section.
A UISlider can be used for various purposes in your application such as a slider to control volume, screen brightness, set distances and many other cases. In todays tutorial I want to create a slider that sets the default zoom distance when zooming in to your current location on a map. [Read more…]
Update April 2025. The tutorial below was written in 2013 and used Objective-C. I have written a new version found here that is written in the latest version of Swift (as of April 2025): How to Use Your Personal Voice with AVSpeechSynthesizer
The AV Foundation Framework received a few extras when iOS 7 launched. One of those is the AVSpeechSynthesizer class which lets you have the device read out text in the voice of Siri.
The class is quite small in that it only has 4 methods and 3 properties which are:
Synthesizing Speech
speakUtterance:
Controlling Speech Synthesis
continueSpeaking
pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:
paused property
speaking property
stopSpeakingAtBoundary:
Managing the Delegate
delegate property