Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February, 2019

Built & Released app within 2 weeks

After successful launch of my last iOS app ,  I wished to make another one  for a different app category. Last time it took me comparatively long time to make highly stable, premium quality UX after much many iterations. Thanks to valuable feedbacks from my peers & social media friends. But this time all I need it in a very short duration. Yes! at the speed of F1 car. Being an F1 fan, I felt heat of upcoming 2019 season a month before it actually begins. I was assured that there are already couple of apps in the App Store which serves the same purpose. Even the official F1 organisation has got own feature rich / futuristic app. So why I am thinking to make my own version which could be a clone... 🤔 Well... the official F1 app is loaded with many great features & uses Unity framework under the hood for live circuits (a state of art feature). All these made heavier (~165MB when installed in my phone) app size to just view race results (if in case!). Couple of...

Keeping app alive in Background State

Smart phones reinforces multitasking possible with all extends. In such cases the app enters to non-foreground (background & suspended) state from various user interactions such as pressing home button, switching apps or even when it could be simply pressing from power button (or Even it could be from System events). These events can cause a suspended app to be returned to the background, or cause a not running app to be launched directly into the background. System events can cause a suspended app to be returned to the background, or cause a not running app to be launched directly into the background. Background Execution Sequence Why I am stressing these points ?  In my recent app I introduced a new feature where I need to: Show a timer that ticks every seconds. A sound file that plays on each seconds. A local notification has to fire on completion of every timer. All the above has to be run in background state without interrupting timer progress bar...

Swift Delhi Meetup - Chapter 16

"It is good to rub, and polish our brain against that of others"  - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Absolutely yes when I end up in Swift-Delhi Meetup (Chapter 16) last weekend. A big thanks to OYO Rooms for the sponsorship & their organising team. There was total 5 exciting talks lined up on that day. In this post let me brief each one of them & hope you can find it useful. Developing Apps for Global Audience (Lightning Talk) - Shrey Bansal, OYO Rooms When the app is targeted global market, it is very much necessary to keep in mind its design & development challenges. He gave many instances like - Localisation of text might effect label frames if it has fixed size. A font family may not support for all the languages for example - Chinese text don't have bold effect 😑. Even colours, symbols, could give different meaning over different countries. When he shown "Stock app" in iPhone - Green & Red colors are switched in Indian and Chinese ap...

Popular posts from this blog

Animating label text update - choosing a better way

Recently I published a countdown app .  At one point of development - I have to show a timer on a UILabel which ticks on each seconds. As usual I started  setting text to a label object - self .timerLabel.text = someString Easy piece of cake right !?   But wait ... it won't take much user attention when timer ticks on every seconds. So I decided to make use of a simple animation while label gets text update. I found there are dozens of ways to animate a label. In this short article, I listed 3 best way you can animate text on a label. ( Spoiler Alert 👀- I decided to go with 3rd option)  1. Fade In - Fade out animation : CATransition class has got transition type `fade`. With timing function of CATransition - I was able to see the below result. let animation: CATransition = CATransition () animation.timingFunction = CAMediaTimingFunction (name: CAMediaTimingFunctionName .easeInEaseOut) animation.type = CATransitionType .fade animation.subtype = C...

Prevent Navigationbar or Tabbar overlapping Subview - solved for Card view

Recently, I started with a Card view added as a subview of UIView in a view-controller. When a view controller created along subviews, it tends to use entire screen bounds and also slips behind Tab bar or Navigation bar. In my current situation, it's second case. Casually new iOS developers will write a patch by additional value for coordinate y and subtracting bar height from its size. A lot of them posted in SO threads too : How to prevent UINavigationBar from covering top of view? View got hidden below UINavigationBar iOS 7 Navigation Bar covers some part of view at Top So, how I got solved ? self.edgesForExtendedLayout = [] This  will avoid all subviews in a view controller get behind any bars. Read full apple  documentation on here. Full Source code below :  //Simple view controller where its view layed-out as a card. class WidgetCardViewController : UIViewController { var containerView = UIView () //MARK:- View Controller Life Cyc...

UICollectionViewCell shows with wrong size on First time - Solved

We commonly use Collection view where its cell size calculated run time. The flow layout delegate is responsible to return individual cell sizes. BUT in most of the cases, delegate method `collectionView: layout sizeForItem:` expects cell size too early. Before generating actual cell size. extension YourViewController : UICollectionViewDelegateFlowLayout { func collectionView ( _ collectionView: UICollectionView, layout collectionViewLayout: UICollectionViewLayout, sizeForItemAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> CGSize { return CGSize (width: externalWidth, height: externalHeight) } } For instance, if a cell size depends on external view and its frame is not yet ready - results with wrong (or outdated) cell size. Typically happens for the first time view controller laid out all views. You can find similar queries in StackOverflow community : Collection view sizeForItemNotWorking UICollectionViewCell content wrong size on first load How to refresh UICollec...

Implementing autocompletion OTP field in iOS

Long waiting is over. !!  iOS 12 brings Autofill for OTP text field which is close to Android provided a decade back. Previously in iOS we used to toggle between OTP text screen and message inbox.  Which was hard to remember and time consuming resulting a bad user experience. Personally, I have been asked from the client/customer couple of times to implement autocompletion for OTP field and took me a lot of time to convey that it is not possible in iOS. Why Autofill was not possible previously?  We all know that Apple gives at most care for user privacy. When we see iOS architecture, each individual app is like a separate island. There is no inter-app bridge between apps (exception for Keychain and URLSchemes APIs which gives very limited scope). Thus we cannot read message content from inbox. Where to start Autofilling? First of all, the target SMS need to have the OTP Code with prefix string "Code" or "Passcode"on its message content. Beware of OTP c...

Static variable vs Class variable in Swift

How Static properties differs to usual properties ? Used to create type properties with either let or var. These are shared between all objects of a class.  During class loading time, a single memory location allocated for the property if we declared as static. Static property belongs to a class (or struct) Type rather than Instance of class (or struct). Hence it also called  Type Properties What if we declare "static var" ? Since it's a variable, we can change it in future even after initialised. When we change the value of the static variable property, that property is now changed in all future instances. What if we declare "static let" ? static let instance : Singleton = Singleton() Since it's constant, we cannot change once initialised. Its value will remain same even if we share among all the instance or object of a class or struct. Useful to adopt singleton pattern. How class variables differ static variables ? It dif...