How-To

In a recent post I noted that iOS 8.1.1 is now available for download. This morning I added a sentence to that post reminding people to BACK UP FIRST. That's because it's not uncommon for something to go wrong when one updates. For example, when I updated to iOS 8, I encountered an error, and the only way to get my iPad out of it was to restore to factory settings. Doing so means that everything is lost. Fortunately, I had backed up first, so it wasn't a problem.

When Apple announced that its keyboards would have a predictive text feature, the general reaction was, "About time, Apple!" But it turns out there are some iOS users who find the feature really annoying. Fortunately, it's easy to remove the predictive text feature on your iphone.

Whenever I see a panoramic view, my first instinct is to take a photo. But a standard shot on the iPhone doesn't capture the view. Here's how to use Apple's Camera app to take panoramic pictures.

Swift's advanced collections can help you model more complex objects in your apps and create an API that is easier to understand and use. In this post, I model a chessboard using Swift's subscripts and also cover tuples and multidimensional arrays!

In part 2 of this post on Swift's protocols, you will learn practical uses for declaring custom protocols in your own apps, and learn further how they improve the architecture of your apps and make them easier to enhance and extend.

In part 1 of this post, I demonstrated how to implement existing Cocoa Touch protocols in your apps. Now you'll learn how and why to create your very own. First, we need to cover the basic construction of a Swift protocol.

Thanks to iOS 8, Apple lovers finally have access to widgets on their iPhones. But users will find some widgets more useful than others. Maximize their utility by deleting widgets you don't need to see in the Today view in Notifications and arranging the rest in the most convenient order.

Protocols are a powerful, advanced tool that help make your apps easier to design and extend. They define standard behavior in classes that are not necessarily related. Protocols used together with delegates allow you to create classes with a well-balanced load of responsibilities.