Building an Instagram-Like App with Parse and Swift
Parse, the mobile app platform, has one particularly interesting product: Parse Core. One of its features allows app developers to store data in the cloud, without worrying about setting up servers and designing a REST API. Parse...
A Swift Tutorial for Google Maps SDK
Working with maps in iOS consists of an entire programming chapter, as there are tons of things that a developer can do with them. From just presenting a location on a map to drawing a journey’s route with intermediate...
Building a Simple Share Extension in iOS 8 App
Share extensions, introduced in iOS 8, give users an easy and convenient way to share content with other entities, such as social sharing websites or upload services. Previously, sharing content usually entailed switching from...
Creating Your Own Custom Controls Using IBDesignable in Xcode 6
Have you tried to create a custom control in older versions of Xcode? It’s not that easy. What makes it so hard is that you couldn’t see your design in the Interface Builder. Every time you want to review the design...
Introduction to Custom View Controller Transitions and Animations
Looking at the built in apps from Apple on your iOS device, you will notice the various animated transitions as you move from one view to another for example the way view controllers are presented in master-detail views with a...
Developing iBeacons Apps with Swift
Since the introduction of iBeacons with iOS 7 by Apple, a lot of things have been said and written about. iBeacon technology consist of a revolutionary way to keep track of the position of a device indoors and use location...
Building Action Extensions in iOS 8
Action extensions allow users to transform content originating in a host app without leaving the app. You can, for example edit images, change the text format, change the text itself, e.t.c. At WWDC 2014, Apple showed us a demo...
Creating a Sidebar Menu Using SWRevealViewController in Swift
As promised, here is the Swift version of the slide out sidebar menu tutorial. Again we will make use of an open source library called SWRevealViewController to build the sidebar menu. Though the library was written in...
Building a Text to Speech App Using AVSpeechSynthesizer
iOS is an operating system with many possibilities, allowing to create from really simple to super-advanced applications. There are times where applications have to be multi-featured, providing elegant solutions that exceed the...
Creating Simple View Animations in Swift
Following the release of iOS 7 (and iOS 8 as well), animation and motion effects became central to the design of apps from both Apple and 3rd party developers. iOS 7 introduced a flat, minimal design to apps which inevitably...