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: 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: Convert Unix Timestamp to a nicely formatted Date & Time
I needed to convert a Unix Timestamp, which for some inexplicit reason was being returned as a String by an API I was using and this is the super foolish function I ended up with. I am not going to shame the API Provider for returning a timestamp as a String 😉 func createDateTime(timestamp: String) […]