By Kevin McNeish
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.
By Kevin McNeish
In previous posts I have touched on inheritance in Swift. In this post, I'm going to be diving deeper and giving you a fuller picture of how inheritance works in Swift, and how you can use it to create apps that are easy to extend when you need to add new functionality. Along the way, you will also learn about the important concept of polymorphism and learn how to use Xcode's new playgrounds!
By Kevin McNeish
If you have read Apple's documentation on Generics and were left wondering how you could use this technology in your own projects, this post is for you! You will learn how to take full advantage of generics in your every-day code as well as how to avoid the constant type-casting that usually results from creating generalized code.
By Kevin McNeish
Access Control is one of the late-breaking features added to the Swift language. It allows you to specify the parts of your code you want to make public, and the parts you want to hide. It's an important tool in creating easy-to-use, and easy-to-understand interfaces.
By Kevin McNeish
In this second part of my two-part post on Demystifying Swift's Initializers, I explain the concepts of initializer chaining, two-phase initialization, and initializer inheritance using hands-on examples that walk you through some of these deeper concepts. You can read part 1 of this post at this link.
If you would like to follow along and perform the step-by-step instructions with this post (highly recommended) you can download the project we have completed so far at this link.
By Kevin McNeish
Now that Apple has officially released Xcode 6 and the NDA has been lifted, it's time to dive deeper into Swift—Apple's new language for building iOS apps. Learning how to properly use initializers in Swift can be daunting at first. Swift's requirement that all stored properties in a class are initialized adds complexity to the initialization process. In the first part of this two-part post I'm going to demystify initializers as I provide a hands-on approach to learning how to best implement initializers in your custom classes.
By Kevin McNeish
The Swift programming language has a new feature called optionals that were not previously available in Objective-C. They are similar to optional types in Java and nullable types in the C# programming language.
By Sarah Kingsbury
Have you ever wanted to tell Siri to keep it down or to speak up, but couldn't find where in the settings to adjust the virtual assistant's volume? That's because there is no Siri volume control in Settings.
Asking Siri to adjust it's own volume doesn't work either. You may recognize these Siri replies from your own attempts to adjust the volume:
By Sarah Kingsbury
Apple does not limit the character count for iMessages; but if you are sending a message to a non iUser it will be sent as an SMS and will therefore be limited to 160 characters. This means characters over 160 will be sent in a second text or possibly even deleted, depending on your recipient's carrier. To avoid this situation, turn on Character Count so you can always know when you've reached the SMS character limit.
By Sarah Kingsbury
Siri can flip a coin, roll dice, or pick random numbers for you.
These may seem like amusing but ultimately useless tricks, unless you are a parent. In which case they can help you navigate all the tricky situations you deal with on a daily basis.
By Sarah Kingsbury
One of my favorite things about my iPhone is the way even a decidedly untalented photographer like me can easily take and share decent photos and videos using the built-in Camera, and I'm always on the lookout for iphoneography tips to help me improve my skills. Here's one on how to take easy silhouette shots with your iPhone, generously shared with me by iPhone Life magazine's newest editor Rheanne Schlee. This really easy trick can result in amazing photos:
By Kevin McNeish
Apple, notorious for its secrecy, has loosened up its restrictive NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) for the beta versions of iOS 8, OS X, and Xcode 6. In the latest version of the iOS Developer Program License Agreement, they have added the following statement in the Confidentiality section under the topic 10.1 Information Deemed Apple Confidential:
By Kevin McNeish
Do you have an idea for an app but lack the programming knowledge to begin building it? In this weekly blog series, I will take you, the beginner app developer, step by step through the process of creating apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Join me each week on this adventure and you will experience how much fun turning your app ideas into reality can be! This is part 40 of the series. If you are just getting started, check out the beginning of the series here.
One of the hottest technologies to come out of iOS 7 is iBeacon. In case you haven't heard, iBeacon is Apple's trademark for what it calls "a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters that can notify nearby iOS 7 devices of their presence." This new technology solves one of the biggest problems with Location Services on iOS devices—pinpointing the location of a device when it's indoors. Unlike GPS technology that determines a device's absolute location in terms of latitude and longitude, the iBeacon technology measures a device's relative distance to an iBeacon in an established location. Since iBeacons work without the need for a WiFi or cellular connection, it makes them ideal for indoor use.
By Sarah Kingsbury
If you haven't already, you should take a moment to introduce Siri to your family. Once you have done so, you can quickly ask Siri to message or call your wife or your brother without having to say their full name. If your spouse's full name is a multi-syllabic mouthful like my husband's, this can be pretty handy.
But first you're going to have to introduce yourself to Siri.
By Paula Bostrom
My grandmother lives in a retirement community, and several times a week she heads up to the social center and plays cards and other games with her friends. For the rest of us, most of our gaming entertainment comes from an interactive screen. Our iDevices provide that entertainment and Game Center ties it all together.
By Sarah Kingsbury
Tapping your iPhone's screen to take pictures can be awkward and cause you to take shaky photos if you tap too enthusiastically. That's why it's so handy to take photos by pushing your iPhone's volume button. But what if you want to focus the photo before snapping the picture?
By Sarah Kingsbury
You know you want to eat out tonight and you know what time you want to eat. The problem is deciding where to eat. Siri can help you with that.
By Sarah Kingsbury
Now that there is no longer an eight tab limit in Safari, it's possible for your tabs to become unmanageable. Fortunately it's easy to move tabs or get rid of them altogether. Here's how:
By Mark Struczewski
Recently, I unsubscribed from all but a few of the email newsletters I receive. Now, when I write “newsletters”, I am referring to those emails that are blog posts. I didn’t unsubscribe from them because the emails were no longer relevant or important to me (they still were) but I did so for two reasons:
1. I was getting a lot of emails. Some sites I subscribe to post several times a day.
2. It was not easy to share the content with my followers on social media via email.
Switch Control, intended for people with mobility limitations, is also great for anyone who fantasized as a child of making things happen with just a blink, à la I Dream of Jeannie. To enable Switch Control, open Settings>General>Accessibility>Switch Control and toggle On.
