DevFright

Learn How to Create iOS Apps

AVSpeechSynthesizer Tutorial – Letting Your App Speak Like Siri

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Update April 2025. The tutorial below was written in 2013 and used Objective-C. I have written a new version found here that is written in the latest version of Swift (as of April 2025): How to Use Your Personal Voice with AVSpeechSynthesizer

The AV Foundation Framework received a few extras when iOS 7 launched. One of those is the AVSpeechSynthesizer class which lets you have the device read out text in the voice of Siri.

The class is quite small in that it only has 4 methods and 3 properties which are:

Synthesizing Speech
speakUtterance:
Controlling Speech Synthesis
continueSpeaking
pauseSpeakingAtBoundary:
paused property
speaking property
stopSpeakingAtBoundary:
Managing the Delegate
delegate property

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MKDirections Tutorial

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iOS 7 has given app developers the ability to add directions to their apps thanks to a new class in the Map Kit Framework called MKDirections. In this tutorial we will take a look at this class and create a simple app that lets you search for an address and calculate the distance as well as receive route-based directions from your current location. This tutorial will work on either an iOS device or on the simulator. [Read more…]

iOS 7 Background App Refresh Tutorial

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Background App Refresh is a new feature added to iOS 7. What it does is allows apps to quietly wake up and download content all while in the background.

Some of the built in Apple apps such as Mail, Contacts and the Calendar have always done this. When a new email arrives, you open the app and the email is there. Likewise, you add a contact on a remote device and it is automatically added to your contact list on your iPhone. On the other hand, all 3rd party apps could not do this. When notifications of a new email arrive, you open the app and then need to wait for syncronisation to happen. The same happens with apps like Evernote where your new notes are not downloaded until you open the app and sync it.

Background App Refresh changes this. iOS 7 developers can now add a few changes to their code and when done, iOS creates a schedule based on how often you use the app and then at intervals through the day, the app will quietly fetch data from your server so that when the user opens up the app, the syncronisation is already done.

Many apps have already taken advantage of this feature. This includes Dropbox, Evernote, Instapaper, Mailbox, Newsify and OmniFocus to name just a few.

Today, I want to show you how you can get your app to take advantage of this iOS 7 feature.

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iBeacons Tutorial for iOS with CLBeaconRegion and CLBeacon

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Updated to Swift. Please visit here for the tutorial using Swift.

At WWDC earlier this year (2013) Apple announced iOS 7. Along with that announcement we heard of new API called iBeacons. iBeacons is a technology that uses transmitters and receivers which can let your iOS device know how far you are away from a beacon. One device acts as the transmitter and the other is a receiver.

iBeacon transmitters can either be a dedicated hardware device running Bluetooth 4.0 LE or you can configure a compatible iPhone or iPad to act as a transmitter. The receiving device is a compatible iPhone or iPad that can receive Bluetooth 4.0 LE. Compatible devices include the iPhone 4S and newer and the iPad 3 and newer (including iPad mini).

To give an example of what you could use iBeacons for, think of a group of museums managed by a single company. Each room in each of the museums would have an iBeacon transmitter placed in them. Each beacon is configured with settings or what Apple refers to as an identity. If you are running an app provided by the museum, each time you enter the museum you will be presented with information which changes depending on what room you are in. [Read more…]