iOS7 Series –Custom Transitions There is a hierarchy of actors you need to visualize here. It goes a little something like: A TransitioningDelegate An AnimatedTransitioning A ContextTransitioning The VC you start out with and that will call the transition will adopt the first protocol, the TransitioningDelegate Protocol. The purpose of doing so is to obtain the authority to manage the entire transition process. You will then create a Transitioning class which we can call the Transition Manager. This class will adopt the AnimatedTransitioning protocol. The purpose of this protocol is to animate the transition. The Transition Manager class receives all the necessary information from the Transitioning Context (a protocol adopted… Read More
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Fetching data from an iOS app – The new NSURLSession API
Ok, this is gonna be short, I promise! 🙂 Do you remember those apps you’ve got stored away or the ones you are working on that fetch data from the web with a NSURLConnection? Time to update them, here’s how. Basically you have a method that calls a web fetch and is somehow signaled to use that received data to refresh a UI. If you used NSURLConnection sendAsynchronousRequest:, you have the issue that it blocks the main thread. It does carry out requests asynchronously from each other, but each request does indeed block the main thread since it is carried out in the main queue. Alternatively, you can use a… Read More
Continue ReadingiOS7 – UIKit Dynamics
iOS7 Series – UIKit Dynamics Incorporating UIKitDynamics into your app is pretty simple! The great thing about it is that you really get the most bang for your buck because the end result has a really big WOW Factor which is certain to impress your users. Let’s take a quick conceptual drive around UIKitDynamics. First we adopt the protocol into the ViewController which will implement UIKitDynamics, why? Well because the objects which will be animated in the end will have to send back a lot of signals like “Hey, I collided with a boundary” or “hey I just hit somebody else and I was going this fast, in this… Read More
Continue ReadingiOS7 Sprite Kit for Game Design for iPhone & iPad
iOS 7 Series – Sprite Kit Welcome to iOS7 and to start off, I want to kick things off with SpriteKit. Although it deals with video games, many companies are using iOS apps as a marketing tactic to engage their users in an effort to promote their products. SpriteKit is the most prominent feature in iOS7 so we’re going to take a quick tour. Go ahead and create a New Project in XCode5 and select the SpriteKit template (the bottom right icon): Click next and fill in your project data. Once you are in the main XCode window notice we have the following files in the Project Navigator: 1) AppDelegate… Read More
Continue ReadingWWDC 2013 Videos of Interest
WWDC 2013 Videos of Interest Introducing Text Kit Advanced Text Layouts & Effects with TextKit Building User Interfaces in iOS7 Custom Transitions Using View Controllers Customizing Your App’s Appearance for iOS 7 Introduction to Sprite Kit Designing Games with Sprite Kit Getting Started with UIKit Dynamics What’s New in iOS User Interface Design Pretty much all the Whats New…
Continue ReadingApple’s iOS7 and the future of development
Sure iOS7 brings a lot of technological advances. But more importantly, it sets a new precedent in the Software Development industry. Here are a reasons: 1). An Elite development team. Many people complain about Apple shutting out developers by not opening up. It’s funny because their code is open, you just have to be willing to pay. Where disgruntled programmers see disappointment, I see a company filtering an elite team of outsourced developers to keep pushing the envelope where only the savviest survive. 2). An evermore demanding market niche. I downloaded ios7 on Monday like most devs. The first thing I noticed was Skype crashing and Testflight failing to install.… Read More
Continue ReadingiOS UI Refresh
iOS is undoubtedly a great touch UI. However, it needs a refresh, it’s long overdue for an overhaul. Not just a “new widget” type refresh but a real overhaul. If we can make a robot that flies millions of miles to explore a hostile planet… SEARCHING FOR APPS The whole repetitive process of searching for apps in the AppStore, installing them, updating them everyday and switching between them is getting so old, so 2012! We’re are in the era of Robots that travel millions of space miles to do their thing. Robots that park cars, help the elderly etc. Our robots are getting smarter by the day. We need our… Read More
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