DevFright

Learn How to Create iOS Apps

Location Authorization in iOS 8

by 2 Comments

Apple has gone the extra mile to make sure the user is explicitly granting your app permission to use the iPhone location services. There are just a few simple steps to go through to get your app setup correctly.

First, add two keys to your info-plist. These are case sensitive and do not appear as a standard entry that you can select. Add both keys so you later have the option of calling either one. Make sure everything is spelled correctly and has the correct “camel case”, otherwise the request for authorization will be ignored.

NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription
NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription

infop [Read more…]

Please Welcome Martin to DevFright.com

by 8 Comments

Although we have been quiet around here for the last few months, I would now like to welcome Martin to the DevFright team. Martin will be joining me in creating comprehensive iOS tutorials. In fact, he has already been posting tutorials for the last few weeks which include Localization in Xcode 6, Swift Action – UIAlertController as well as a few other tutorials about some of the less mentioned features of Xcode and iOS development. His author page which shows all his current posts can be found here.

Martin has been an iOS developer for a few years now and has experience building a number of apps as an indie developer. Those can be found at M45Apps.com for those of you who want to take a look at his quality of work.

I have been working with Martin for a few months now and we have teamed up to work on this website as well as provide app building services.

So you can get a feel of one of Martins apps, he recently launched Reflektere (Norwegian for Reflect I believe) which is available on the app store. We have 10 codes to give away for the first 10 users who comment (indicating that you want a code for a free download). Please use a valid email address to post your comment and we will pass the code to your email address so you can get a free copy of the app.

The Reflektere app uses a number of frameworks to allow it to store data, retrieve data, get location, set timers, pass notifications and eventually, we will add the iBeacon classes to it so you can get messages based on proximity to an iBeacon. All these types of technologies will be explained in detail over the coming months if we haven’t covered the subject already.

Localization in Xcode 6 – Tutorial

by 4 Comments

Your app is available around the world, but you’ve only made your app in the English language? You want to offer your app in the native language of ever user… but how?

Apple has 150 App Stores around the world with hundreds of millions of users. If your goal is to get as many downloads as possible, then make it available in every supported language (there are 40!!!). Maximize your apps potential via localization!

Localization is the ability of your app to display text, images, sounds, and numeric formats(dates and numbers), in the users device language. Localization should be standard practice in all apps, but prior to Xcode 6 it was quite a bit of work.

Apple has gone out of their way to simplify this process and after reading this demo I think you’ll be amazed. Xcode 6 makes localization a “pas sorcier”, or “no brainer”. [Read more…]

Swift Action – UIAlertController

by 2 Comments

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.

swiftNewProj [Read more…]

Targeted Social Sharing using the Social Framework – Tutorial

by 1 Comment

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.

The steps to implement intentional sharing to one service are as follows:

– 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…]

Social Sharing using UIActivityViewController

by 6 Comments

ShareScreenApple 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 €œSocial€  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…]

UIKitDynamics Sliding Menu Tutorial for iOS

by 3 Comments

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…]

Adding the Parallax Effect with UIInterpolatingMotionEffect – Tutorial

by 1 Comment

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 doesn€™t 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 I€™ll 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…]

Moving on to Swift

by 3 Comments

It’s been a while since I added tutorials to DevFright, but now that I have some work completed, it is time to get working again and creating some great and helpful tutorials for you. Due to that big announcement a bit ago at WWDC 2014, I have decided that I’ll now focus on providing Swift tutorials rather than continue the focus on Objective-C. I have thought about a mixture of both, but settled on just Swift as this is where Apple is now focussing on the coming months and years and it makes sense to switch over ready for when iOS 8 launches in a few months time.

If you have any specific tutorials you want to see, drop a note in the comments below and I’ll do my best to accommodate.

iOS Data Download Progress Bar Tutorial

by 5 Comments

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.

iOS Progress Bar Tutorial

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.

navigationWhen 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…]