Accessibility is a very complex topic and as you start to engage with the topic, you quickly recognize how deep it’ll go. For this quick blog post, we’ll barely scratch the surface. I am not an expert and I likely will never be. I count myself lucky that Apple’s environment builds in a lot of […]
How to add a hover effect to a UITableViewCell (Swift)
When iPadOS 13.4 was released so was much improved Mouse-Pointer support. While a non starter on your iPhone, iPad with a trackpad and external keyboard quickly turns into a very capable computing device. For my app – Open Access Helper – I wanted to support this feature, even if it wouldn’t be used a lot. […]
Swift 4: Copy a UILabel in iOS
By default a UILabel doesn’t get any copy & paste commands in iOS. After all, it’s a label, why would you want to copy a label? It turns out, you might want to do that, if you are “abusing” a label to show something useful and in that case you probably want the entire label […]
Swift 4: Adding new UI Elements to the Main.strings file, which Xcode auto-generates for you
When you are ready to localize your App, Xcode will auto-generate a Main.strings file for your Main Storboard. In that file every element of the User Interface (labels & more) are listed in the following format: /* Class = “UILabel”; text = “Subtitle”; ObjectID = “y5E-9n-LU8”; */ “y5E-9n-LU8.text” = “Untertitel”; That’s a pretty awesome format, […]
Swift 4: Help align UITextView to other labels, by avoiding the annoying inset
When aligning a UITextView with other labels on the screen, the inset becomes an issue. It is easy enough to work around, however if you wanted to just “switch” them off, you can add the following to your ViewDidLoad Function: textView.textContainerInset = .zero textView.textContainer.lineFragmentPadding = 0
Swift 4: Validating a 13 digit ISBN
For a project I needed to validate a 13 digit ISBN. According to Wikipedia you can validate an ISBN by calculating the checksum, but more accurately calculating the check-digit of an ISBN as follows: The ISBN-13 check digit, which is the last digit of the ISBN, must range from 0 to 9 and must be […]
Swift 4: An extension to define UIColors with “normal” RGB values and set some named colors
UIColors require you to enter red, green and blue as values between 0 and 1. In pracitcal terms that means you need to divide your values by 255 to obtain the CGFloat required. Easy enough? Surely! Still it is a tad annoying, especially as the rest of the world will give you RGB values between […]
Swift 4: Pull To Refresh / UIRefreshControl
TableViews can have a useful feature to refresh the data inside of them, simply pull to refresh. Apple didn’t invent this, that was Loren Brichter of Tweetie, which was sold to Twitter and Twitter was eventually granted a Patent for the feature. Today this feature is absolutely ambiguous and very easy to implement. For example, […]
Swift 4: JSON decoding with JSONDecoder() and structs
I have no apps in the app store, but a while ago I wrote an app for my own edutainment, which needed to parse JSON Data. At the time it was so darn complicated, that I enlisted Cocoapods and SwiftyJSON to help make things easier. SwiftJSON is pretty cool as it abstracts away a lot […]
Swift 4: Show Network Activity Indicator
I sure am going to be unpopular, but I don’t get why an App is allowed to make “silent” network requests – in other words: I don’t get why the Network Indicator isn’t shown by the OS to alert users that there is network activity going on. However if you have a function, which makes […]
