Learn How to Create iOS Apps
Parse.com was a MBaaS that shut down in 2017 and became Parse Platform, which is now an open-source version with a thriving community. It is a backend framework for mobile and web applications that you can install on a server and host yourself.
I first started using Parse when it was new, I believe around 2012/2013 on a project building an iPad app for time tracking at various locations on the west coast of the USA.
[Read more…]Context menus provide a simple way of displaying additional actions in response to a long-press on a View item. Some items in your view might require more options, but rather than cluttering a menu or the View with these options, they can be grouped together in a contextMenu.
Since iOS 2, the Core Location framework has provided the way to find a devices geographical location. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to request location permission, retrieve your devices currently location, and display these real-time updates in a SwiftUI app.
Given its age, the Core Location framework has an extensive set of tools that go beyond just finding the users current location. We will look at some of these features today, but also in future tutorials so that you can work with your users location in a way that is suitable for your app.
[Read more…]In this tutorial, we’ll add Buttons to a NavigationStack toolbar and position them correctly according to your needs. To demonstrate what can be done, we’ll add animations to the buttons based on the SF Symbols tutorial.
Apple’s SF Symbols is a large amount of scalable icons that integrate with SwiftUI. The library has over 6,000 icons ready for you to use in your iPhone app.
Symbols come in nine weights and three scales, automatically align with text, and can be exported and edited using vector graphics editing tools to create custom symbols with shared design characteristics and accessibility features.
To help you find symbols to use in your app, Apple provides the SF Symbols app that you can download to a Mac to browse through the library. You can find details here.
In this tutorial we’ll look at how to use symbols and how to modify characteristics to suit the look and feel of your app.
[Read more…]The pull-to-refresh gesture has been around since the early days of the iPhone when Tweetie launched in around 2008. It provided a way for a table view to refresh by swiping down to a point where the refresh was triggered.
Apple introduced it in the UIRefreshControl class in iOS 6. In iOS 15 in 2021, Apple added support natively to SwiftUI.
It is now known as refreshable and is an instance method in the View. Lets take a look at how it works.
[Read more…]Some apps use an onboarding flow to take users through some of the features as well as help get things set up, such as permissions. In this tutorial we’ll create a simple onboarding experience using the TabView and PageTabViewStyle so that your users can swipe through the introduction screens.
We will also make use of @AppStorage to store that the user has seen the onboarding screens and doesn’t need to see them again.
[Read more…]In iPhone apps, there comes a time when you might need to show an alert to a user to ask them for input. Apple provides the alert instance method on a view for you to use. This particular instance method is for iOS 15 and later. Here is how you use it:
struct ContentView: View {
@State private var showAlert = false
var body: some View {
VStack {
Button("Show Alert") {
showAlert.toggle()
}
.alert(
"Important Message", // Title of the alert
isPresented: $showAlert, // Binding to show the alert
actions: {
Button("Allow") {
// Action when "Allow" button is pressed
print("User pressed Allow")
}
Button("Don't Allow", role: .destructive) {
// Action when "Don't Allow" button is pressed
print("User pressed Don't Allow")
}
},
message: {
Text("Do you want to allow this action?")
}
)
.padding()
}
}
}
In a few of the tutorials here, we have used URLSession to download data. Rather than skip over it as something that is used as part of a project, I thought I best create a tutorial on how to use it so that you can grasp what it is and what it is doing, as well as what else can be done with it.
URLSessions are useful for various reasons which include communicating with an external server to download large datasets, sending information to a server, particularly a backend service or image upload service, and many more uses. URLSession is the built in way of coordinating network data transfer tasks.
[Read more…]In this tutorial we will be looking at how to use async/await as well as the Task struct, which is a unit of asynchronous work. If you are new to these terms, then by the end of this, you’ll have a greater understanding of what they are and how they can benefit your app.
The project we will write today will reach out to a server to fetch a JSON response that contains users. In the tutorial we will see how we can use Task to make this work. We will also use async/await and see where this is needed.
[Read more…]