Skip to main content

sketchyTech

Search This Blog

Most Wanted (2014): Popular posts on the sketchyTech blog

on December 19, 2014

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

By Jacob Spinks from Northamptonshire, England (starling fledgling) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Over 150 blogposts were released into the wild on the sketchyTech site this year. It has been a busy time to say the least. Here's how the most successful fledglings faired.

Note: The number in parentheses is the number of page views recorded by Blogger for the post. Any post with more than 1,000 page views is recorded here, but this of course gives bias to earlier months, because more recent posts have had less time to accumulate views.

January

Enable your iOS app to share files via iTunes and to open files sent from other apps ('Open In') (1,877)

February

JSON and the JavaScriptCore Framework (Xcode/iOS) (1,559)

Collections: Dictionaries, Arrays, Lists and Maps in iOS, Windows Store apps and Android (1,515)

Changing the background colour in iOS (Xcode), Windows Store apps (Visual Studio) and Android (Eclipse) (1,241)

Important differences between UIButton, UIBarButtonItem, and UITabBarItem in iOS (Xcode) (1,061)

March

Easiest way to zip and unzip files in your iOS app (Xcode) (4,946)

Open a file in another app using a UIDocumentInteractionController (Xcode/iOS) (2,266)

NSUndoManager made simple (Xcode/iOS) (2,205)

How to change the background colour of an NSView in OS X 10.8 onwards (Xcode) (2,158)

EPUB2 to EPUB3: Lessons Learnt in Conversion (1,997)

April

SHA1 encryption in iOS (1,378)

May

UICollectionView: A super simple example (iOS/Xcode) (5,722)

Text-level semantics: italics (i), emphasis (em), bold (b) and strong (strong) in EPUB3 (1,539)

June

JSON and Xcode (iOS): The Swift Basics (4,920)

Goodbye blocks: Passing a closure to a parameter in Swift (Xcode/iOS) (2,602)

July

Swift: join() and split() explained (2,235)

Swift: Using filter() to remove items from Arrays (1,184)

Swift: Inheritance and generics in algorithms (1,184)

An A-Z of Swift Protocol Names (Xcode 6, beta 4) (1,178)

August

Swift: A pure Swift method for returning ranges of a String instance (Xcode 6 Beta 5) (5,447)

Swift: reverse(), sort() and sorted() explained (3,430)

Swift: Creating styled and attributed text with NSAttributedString and NSParagraphStyle (updated) (3,051)

Unsafe pointers in Swift: A first look (Part I, Xcode 6 Beta 6) (2,801)

Unsafe pointers in Swift: Conversion to and from a COpaquePointer (and CFunctionPointer) (Part II, Xcode 6 Beta 6) (2,127)

Swift: Use for-in loops with your own sequence types (1,915)

Pure Swift: A method for replacing occurrences of a string within a string (Xcode 6 Beta 5) (1,429)

Pure Swift: A little deeper into generics (Xcode 6 Beta 5 and Beta 6) (1,401)

Swift: Bytes for Beginners (Part I) (1,371)

Pure Swift: Conversion of Cocoa dependent code (Xcode 6 Beta 5) (1,084)

Swift: Bytes for Beginners (Part II) (1,060)

Swift: AnyObject is not your only option for mixing things up ('Collections of Protocol Types') (1,009)

September

Swift: The rules of being weak and unowned in closures and capture lists (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (2,867)

Polymorphism and Protocols in Swift (Xcode 6.0.1) (2,393)

Swift: Overriding vs Overloading (Xcode 6 GM) (1,902)

Swift: A basic step-by-step use of a Swift class from an Objective-C file (Xcode 6 GM) (1,868)

Swift: The difference between a closure and an @autoclosure (Xcode 6 GM) (1,642)

Swift: The rules of being lazy (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,626)

Unsafe pointers in Swift: How to build a zombie (Part III, Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,579)

Swift: The rules of being class (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,342)

Swift: The rules of being weak (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,321)

Swift: The rules of being static (Xcode 6 GM) (1,301)

Review: Swift Development with Cocoa by Jon Manning, Paris Buttfield-Addison and Tim Nugent (Early Release, O'Reilly) (1,214)

Swift: The rules of being unowned (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,046)

October

Playing with the Primitives: Characters, chars and strings in Swift and Objective-C (Xcode 6.1)

(2,218)

A year of thinking in circles: 2015 (Xcode 6.1) (1,932)

Swift by Numbers: The long and the short of it (Xcode 6.0.1) (1,296)

November

Swift: Drawing Regular Polygons with CGPath, CGContext, UIBezierPath and CAShapeLayer (1,343)

The Power of Hexagons: Starting from scratch with 3D drawing in Swift (CAShapeLayer, CGPath) (1,185)

Swift: How to draw a clock face using CoreGraphics and CoreText (Part 1) (1,106)

December

Swift: The quiet affair of the failable initializer and the nil coalescing operator (1,585)

Follow @sketchytech

Endorse on Coderwall

HTML JavaScript. zip JSON Swift UICollectionView Xcode

Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

The Power of Hexagons: Two-dimensional drawing on a three-dimensional surface (iOS, Swift, Xcode, CGPath, CAShapeLayer)

In this post I'm going to illustrate the drawing of a two-dimensional shape on the surface of a cube face. I am hopeful that by performing the drawing without using a straight 3D transformation certain things might come to light that inform and inspire. Drawing a 2D shape on a surface of a cube First it is necessary to draw the shape on a 2D grid and then to draw the same grid relative to a three-dimensional surface. Whether in flat orientation or 3D the points of the grid relative to the vertices will remain the same. Once the plotting is done the points of the two-dimensional shape (in this case a slightly irregular hexagon) will be known and the code can be written and run. (A Swift playground version of the code can be found here thanks to minor adaptations by @ChromophoreApp .) It is also possible by simply rotating the points of the cube to shift the rotation of the shape , because the shape is constructed from points relative to the...

Adventures in PDF: Swift and PDFKit

Working with PDFs in OS X is straightforward using PDFKit (update: and in iOS since iOS 11). PDFDocument It all starts with the PDFDocument class and in order to leverage this you simply import Quartz and get started. Like so: import Quartz let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("myPDF", withExtension: "pdf") let pdf = PDFDocument(URL: url) pdf.pageCount() // number of pages in document pdf.string() // entire text of document As you can see counting the number of pages and accessing the text is straightforward and there's plenty more to explore alongside this, but I want to move quickly along to working with pages. PDFPage While you can access a string of the entire document and this is useful for searches, more often you'll want to work with PDFPage instances. You access pages by their index: import Quartz let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("myPDF", withExtension: "pdf") let pdf = PDFDocument(URL: ur...

Swift: Let's talk about text (UILabel, CATextLayer, UIView, CoreText, UITextView, UIWebView)

In preparation for a series of posts looking at the presentation of text in iOS, this post describes use cases and an overview of the main options. There are a number of posts based around text display on this site already, some of which are referenced in this post, but these are mostly older posts written with Objective-C code examples, or only discuss text as part of a larger project. This is something I hope to rectify with the posts that follow this one, but first let's get to know the main options for text display. UILabel When programming for iOS, the entry point for most people into the world of text is the UILabel. The UILabel can be conveniently dragged and dropped onto a view inside a Storyboard file and does many of the things that are needed for the display of a small amount of text. The UILabel class is extremely flexible once tamed. It is capable of displaying text across single or multiple lines, text can be wrapped and/or truncated, as well as being style...

UIDocumentInteractionController and Swift: Two rules to never forget

A UIDocumentInteractionController is used to enable the sharing of documents between your app and other apps installed on a user's device. It is simple to set up as long as you remember two rules: Always make the UIDocumentInteractionController instance a class (type) property. If you only retain a reference to the controller for the life of the method that is triggered by the button press your app will crash. Configure the UIDocumentInteractionController before the button calling the method is pressed so that there is not a wait in which the app is waiting for the popover to appear. The second "rule" is applied because while the presentation of the controller happens asynchronously, the instantiation does not. And you may find that there is a noticeable delay to open the popover if you throw all the code for instantiation and presentation inside a single method called on the press of a button. Note: If you're dealing with a document that is being contin...

Dodge and Burn in Procreate (iPad)

For a quick dodge in Procreate select the eraser and reduce the opacity, while for a makeshift burn set the paint brush to black and use the opacity slider in the same way. But if you'd like something a bit more flexible and less destructive try this: 1. Create a layer above the one you want to colour dodge 2. In the layer menu click the little 'N' button on the right-hand side 3. Select lighten from the bottom tab bar and set type to, 'color dodge' 4. Click on the layer's thumbnail, select opacity 5. Slide your finger or stylus left across screen to lower opacity to 16% for example (you'll need something drawn on the selected layer for this to work) 6. Open layers again 7. Create another layer and repeat step 2, then select the darken tab and select 'color burn' 8. Repeat the opacity step 5 9. Now use these two layers to dodge and burn your image using the regular brushes 10. For subtle burning and dodging select the underneath colour an...

Important differences between UIButton, UIBarButtonItem, and UITabBarItem in iOS (Xcode)

UINavigationBar In Xcode, when you create a Navigation Controller or a Table View Controller (within a navigation controller) you are given the option to display a top bar and/or a bottom bar. The top bar is known as a Navigation Bar and we are allowed to drag buttons, text fields, segmented controllers and so on here. But space is limited. Note: There are a total of three items allowed on the top bar of the iPhone but a segmented controller allows us to add more than one option, and no matter how many segments it contains it only ever counts as one item. When it comes to the Navigation Bar, it is important to grasp the difference between a UIButton and a UIBarButton. The former can display text and images, but the latter has all the system icons available: things like Share (or Action) buttons are available in the UIBarButton class. Further, it must be noted that there are some unusual things to be aware of. First, a plain Navigation Item can be used ...

Local Storage: How to debug it and why Safari throws errors

If you are testing localStorage with files on your machine, you will find that Chrome and Firefox have no problem with this and work normally but Safari refuses to store any key/value pairs when the page is not delivered via a server. Safari throws the error "SecurityError: The operation is insecure." inside the Debugger (Develop > Show Web Inspector > Debugger) and the Local Storage remains empty (Develop > Show Web Inspector > Storage > Local Storage). The solution is to either serve remotely or to use MAMP , for example, rather than attempting to load the html directly from your machine. Alternatively, use Chrome and Firefox to test locally. You can also Disable Local File Restrictions in the Safari Develop menu as a solution. Did they remove the "disable local restrictions" or something like this in the dev menu? — Jiminy Panoz (@JiminyPan) August 11, 2018 Thanks to Jiminy Panoz for the reminder on this last point and his recommend...

iDraw vs TouchDraw vs Inkpad (Vector Graphics on the iPad)

I've been working with vector drawing apps on the iPad for a while now, and I'd like to share some of the features that I think make each perform well (and not so well in some areas) when compared to a desktop equivalent like Adobe Illustrator. iDraw The things it does well: (1) an impressive shear tool to tilt objects through the z-axis (2) shape/icon library (includes iOS icons) (3) PDF and SVG import (4) proportional resizing (hold down one finger on other side of screen while stretching) (6) smart guides (Illustrator style) (7) iWork style document page (and drag to create folders feature) (8) place text on path (highlight curve/path at same time as text then with the Arrange/Modify tab choose Place Text on Path from bottom of Modify menu) (9) text can be converted to outlines (10) shapes can be filled with images from photo library (11) magnifying loupe (12) ability to lock items (not layers) (13) there is a Mac version that can exchange files in iDraw fo...

The inner world of a blockquote (HTML5/EPUB3)

The IDPF Accessibility QA Checklist makes one mention of blockquotes and that is to check that: Headings have not been used in blockquote and figure elements Elsewhere in the EPUB3 spec we don't find specific reference to <blockquote>, so we assume based on this statement, The XHTML document type defined by this specification is based on W3C [HTML5], and inherits all definitions of semantics, structure and processing behaviors from the HTML5 specification unless otherwise specified. that we should be applying the rules of HTML5. So what are the rules of HTML5 for blockquotes? Well they differ from HTML4 for a start. Blockquotes Where in HTML4 and EPUB2 we were required to nest <p> tags inside all <blockquote> tags, now we are free to place text directly inside the <blockquote>. So we can do stuff like this: <blockquote>This is a single sentence displayed as a blockquote</blockquote> Paragraph tags As before if we have paragra...

Swift: Translating and Rotating a CGContext, A Visual Explanation (iOS/Xcode)

The purpose of this post is to demystify as far as possible the process of translating and rotating a CGContext. Obtaining a reference to a CGContext Before anything else, it is necessary to obtain a reference to the current context from the drawRect() method of a UIView subclass. override func drawRect(rect:CGRect) { // obtain context let ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext() } The context provides the information on where to draw: "You can think of a graphics context as a drawing destination" ( Apple Developer ). Drawing a circle With the context available to us, let's suppose we draw a circle at the centre of it. The black square represents the context: In Swift we could add the following code to the drawRect() method in order to draw the circle: // Decide on radius let rad = CGRectGetWidth(rect)/3.5 // End angle will be 2*pi for any circle that begins at 0 let endAngle = CGFloat(2*M_PI) // We could use CGContextAdd...

Powered by Blogger