iOS Cookbook

Tag: Extensions

  • Tutorial: Implementing UIInterpolating MotionEffect

    This is quite a neat effect that you can add to any of your views on your app. Essentially as you move your phone, the accelerometers inside predict the orientation changes of the phone and provide this movement to your view. It is a great trick to help bring attention to prominent views or images in your app. By creating a small extension on the UIView class you will be able to add this effect to any view with one line of code.

    Tutorial

    First of all, you want to set up a single view application template. Then create a fixed size UIView to contain your main UIImageView. It is important that the clip to bounds attribute for the UIView is set to true and the UIImageView is constrained to be larger than the UIView.

    Screen Shot 2018-01-28 at 8.17.12 AM

    Here is the extension that you will need to add to your project that you can use on any UIView or subclass of UIView.

    https://gist.github.com/rtking1993/e0692e99f0dde15b3cbb32eee0ef8ca0

    Then we want to connect our UIImageView to an outlet and implement the motion effect in the viewDidLoad method.

    https://gist.github.com/rtking1993/2e31ae78464b0aa2a8b54f26c9cda06c

    Adjusting the intensity will change the severity of the effect, reducing the intensity will make the effect less pronounced while increasing the intensity will raise the sensitivity. Be careful of setting the intensity too high, as it could leave your users feeling a bit nauseous!

    Here is the full source code for the project:

    https://github.com/rtking1993/UIImagePickerViewController

  • Code Snippet: UIAlertController Error Extension

    It is an essential part of software development to handle errors correctly and iOS development is no different. It is important to reduce the impact of the error to your user and inform your user clearly if an action is required.

    Here is the extension that you will need to add to your project and the implementation of how you would present the UIAlertController within a UIViewController class.

    https://gist.github.com/rtking1993/26a4d36a69563f38f5e726949b6edd67

  • Tutorial: Creating an iOS Share Sheet

    iOS share sheets are a great way to allow your users to share content from your app. This is a great way to provide your users with the ability to share your app with their network of friends and family for you. A recommendation from somebody you trust is both more powerful than an advertisement and free for the app owner. It is also very easy to do.

    Tutorial

    Firstly, add this extension to the UIViewController to your project. It requires you to pass in your object and will present a share sheet for this object on the active UIViewController.

    https://gist.github.com/rtking1993/36e4191190bff961c0d901640b572ffd

    Next, we have the implementation, we want to create an object with three parameters (text, image, and url), then we call our presentShareSheet function from our extension.

    https://gist.github.com/rtking1993/3b6b1e7d5c7a1ca6aebd41dd163d1b87

    As you can see we are doing this inside an IBAction, so we can create the share sheet whenever we like. And something like the image below is what you should see.

     

    The full source code for a test project I have created for displaying iOS share sheets is available:

    https://github.com/rtking1993/ShareSheet