How-To

There are several hands-free ways you can answer a ringing iPhone while your hands are covered by bulky, hard-to-remove gloves. You could start by wearing touchscreen-sensitive gloves. Or using a stylus. Or plugging in a pair of headphones. But what if your gloves were chosen not for their touchscreen compatibility but for their ability to keep your hands warm while the polar vortex is in town? What if you don't have a stylus or a pair of headphones quickly accessible in your winter gear and you really want to take that incoming call? There's a simple solution; just be prepared for some funny looks.

Thanks to iCloud, you can create things like shopping lists or to-do lists in Reminders at home on your iPad and then access and edit those lists on your iPhone while you're out running errands or shopping. But what if you want someone else to have a copy of the list on his or her device and you don't want to use the Family Sharing Reminders list or that person's not part of your Family? Here's how you can share your shopping list with another person using iCloud.

The other day, I was about to head out on the trails for my annual attempt at completing a couch-to-5K program, when I realized that my iPhone battery was almost out of juice. I didn't want to risk having my phone die while I was out on the relatively deserted trails (what if I got attacked by angry squirrels and needed to call for help?) And I needed to leave the house soon or I wouldn't be able to complete the workout before sunset.

Automatic exposure (which determines how light or dark our images should be) is so convenient and accurate most of the time, but then there are those times when we end up with  overexposed or underexposed images that make us cringe. After all, our cameras are pretty advanced, but it's still impossible for them to recognize when we want our focal point darker (such when shooting silhouettes) or lighter. 

Apple has announced they expect third party apps to support Dynamic Type. However, if you have tried to implement it in your apps, you know there are some unexpected land mines along the way (such as static table view cells and custom cell styles). In this article, you will learn how Dynamic Type works under the hood and how to get it working properly in a variety of scenarios. You will also get some Swift code that makes it easier to implement Dynamic Type in your apps.

Some people say that Pinterest is the new Google. People head to Pinterest to search for project ideas, recipes, and news about their favorite topics. Using the Follow Interest tool, you can easily find new pins about your favorite topics without following other pinners one at a time. Pinterest will find the most popular pins from all of of the users who are posting about the topics you love and display them in your Pinterest feed. I've used this feature to find new pinners to follow and find more great pins about my favorite topics: health & fitness, technology, and DIY. 

Have you always wanted to build an iOS app, but lacked the knowledge and skills? Have you ever signed up for an online course on creating iOS apps, only to feel frustrated because the content was out of date or not comprehensive enough? Are you dying to learn more about Swift and programming for the Apple Watch? It's a story we hear all the time at iPhone Life. And that's why we decided to partner with iPhone app expert, former Apple employee, and adjunct professor at RIT Paul Solt to make his iOS development courses available to iPhone Life readers at a big discount.

Extensions are one of Swift's best features. Extensions allow you to add behavior to existing classes, including classes in the Cocoa Touch Framework. Apple can't add every feature you want to their framework classes, but they have provided a tool to allow you to do it yourself! In this article, you will learn practical uses for Swift extensions you can use immediately in your iOS projects.

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.

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.

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