#ios-000

The following is a guest post by Dulio Denis and originally appeared on his blog. Dulio is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

With my Corporate Directory CapStone project I found myself needing to format a phone number in phone fields like cell phone, home phone, office phone, etc.  I was surprised to find this is not as easy on an iPhone as you may think.  Even though clearly Apple has this functionality in Contacts they have no Public API for phone formatting.  You may think what’s the big deal anyhow. Well, in the US you could have a leading 1 or not and you want to be consistent with area code segmentation and then there are international numbers.  I started looking on stackoverflow but thought there ought to be a better way than implementing my own NSFormatter.After looking around I found a good GitHub project by Willy Shark, A.K.A. Serheo Shatunov, called SHSPhoneComponent.  The good news is it also has a CocoaPod.

In this post I’ll outline how to integrate this CocoaPod into your project.

1. First, update your Podfile with the below and do a pod update:

2. Then in your Storyboard or Nib file create a UITextFiled for the phone number to be formatted.  I was using UILabels which do not work as these are UITextField and NSFormatter subclasses for formatting phone numbers. Connect your UITextField(s) to the proper View’s Outlet(s). Since we are using a custom class we need to make the @property of the phone labels look something like:

Then using the Identity Inspector set the custom class of the UITextField to this SHSPhoneTextField.

3. In your View’s include the following libraries:

4. In your View’s ViewDidLoad method

The following is a guest post by Dasmer Singh and originally appeared on his blog. Dasmer is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

In class, some of us have been using a very cool CocoaPod - MMDrawerController.  It’s very useful and similar UI has been used in Facebook, GroupMe, Twitter and a plethora of other apps as well.

The pod essentially creates drawers that open from the left and right of the view, and I think it’s a great place to put settings/navigation options on an already real-estate constrained screen.

I’ve posted an example on GitHub at the following link:

https://github.com/Dasmer/BlogDrawerPractice

Here I am using a category on MMDrawerController called MMDrawerController+Storyboard (MMDrawerController was made for XIBs or programmatically created View Controllers).  In the storyboard I make the root view controller a MMDrawerController and then create 2 custom segue’s. One to a navigation controller and the other to a table view controller.  I labeled the segue to the navigation controller “mm_center” and the segue to the table view controller “mm_left”.

This sounds hacky (and it is), but whenever you use MMDrawerController+Storyboard you MUST label your segues like this. The Cocoapod is amazing, but its not 100% perfect.  Another issue with the pod is that when you turn on all breakpoints, if you don’t want a particular drawer (in my case I did not make a right drawer), the debugger stops at the exception when the MMDrawerController loads.

In my example I used the tableview to swap my center view controller. To do so,  I had to be able to refer to my MMDrawerController (essentially my container ViewController kind of like a SplitViewController). To easily do that, I needed to import a UIViewController category ”UIViewController+MMDrawerController.h”. This comes in the pod and gives me access to the MMDrawerController by referring to self.mm_drawerController. Then I just reset the center view controller depending on which button was clicked.  

Check out my repo at the link above. Below I posted links to the MMDrawerController Cocoapod and the Mhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quickcontact-qrcode-scanner/id735849910 Cocoapod. They also have some extremely useful examples that discuss customization even further.

MMDrawerController:

https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMDrawerController

MMDrawerController+Storyboard:

My latest app QuickContact is now available in the App Store. 

Here’s a link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quickcontact-qrcode-scanner/id735849910

https://github.com/TomSwift/MMDrawerController-Storyboard

The following is a guest post by Dulio Denis and originally appeared on his blog. Dulio is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Today, at Flatiron, I presented a Tech Talk that provided a tour of UIScrollView.  The UIScrollView class provides support for displaying content that is larger than the size of the application’s window. It enables users to scroll within that content by making swiping gestures, and to zoom in and back from portions of the content by making pinching gestures. On a phone, and even an iPad, this is crucial.

UIScrollView is the superclass of several UIKit classes including:

UITableView

UITextView

The UIScrollView class can have a delegate that must adopt the UIScrollViewDelegate protocol. For zooming and panning to work, the delegate must implement bothviewForZoomingInScrollView: and scrollViewDidEndZooming:withView:atScale:; in addition, the maximum (maximumZoomScale) and minimum ( minimumZoomScale) zoom scale must be different.

Apple is a Heavy User of UIScrollView and its the first thing a user sees in Apple’s Nesting of Scroll Views usage at the Lock Screen. Some notable examples are:

iOS 7 Lock Screen: Scroll To Unlock Two Page Scroll View

Notifications are an Embedded Vertical Scroll View where Each Notification is an Embedded Horizontal Scroll View

Spotlight

Multitasking

Calendar

Clock

the list goes on and on

I then presented some examples of my own attempts at a cross directional UIScrollView implementation like those seen in the MLB AtBat App, Facebook, or Pulse.  In my journeys I also wanted to implement paging of images in my examples and I encountered theUIPageViewController class which was introduced in iOS 5 as a mechanism to implement a page turning style of user interface in iOS applications. It is the successor to the UIPageControl class and as such is easier to use.  I showcased the Path App as utilizing a Tutorial that can easily be done with this class and my own attempt to implement it.

Another area of note is the Apple PhotoScroller iOS Developer Library sample project which demonstrates the use of embedded UIScrollViews and CATiledLayer to create a rich user experience for displaying and paginating photos that can be individually panned and zoomed. This sample goes over the top with CATiledLayer which is used to increase the performance of paging, panning, and zooming with high-resolution images or large sets of photos.

Finally, after reviewing GitHub I found a great open source (MIT License) project by Andrey Tarantsov of Russia called ATPagingView.  This is a great library of code for exactly what we toured in the talk: implementing timed horizontal scrolling of several images which take up most of the screen. You have to implement the timer yourself that switches the view, and it does have user enabled switching as well.

The following is a guest post by Basar Akyelli and originally appeared on his blog. Basar is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

For my upcoming Flatiron School Meet-up talk, I’ve been learning about ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Api’s. My aim is to be able to build a back end for an iOS App eventually; so I am planning to put all of the moving parts together on my MacBook.

Since I need Visual Studio to build ASP.NET Web Api’s, I purchased Parallels and installed Windows 7 as a virtual machine. Then I installed Visual Studio 2013 and started getting my hands dirty. Little did I know that I needed to take quite a few steps to be able to access my web application from Safari OS X.

Here are the steps that I followed to make all this work:

1) Disable Firewall in Windows 7: Obviously the ideal way of dealing with this would be opening ports for your web applications. But since I’m only planning to use my Parallels virtual machine for ASP.NET development, I took the risk and disabled the entire firewall. 

2) Fix Parallels Sharing Preferences Before Installing Visual Studio:  This took me the longest time. In order for IIS Express to find its configuration files, you need to make sure Parallels does not map OS X Documents folder to Windows Documents folder.

3) Update Network Adapter Settings for your Windows 7 Installation: We want OS X to be able to ping Windows 7. In order for this to work, you need to make sure both OS’s are on the same subnet. I made this work by tweaking the Parallels settings:

4) Fix IIS Express Configuration: Your IIS Express configuration file resides in this location: %USERPROFILE%\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config

You need to open this file and fix the following line which corresponds to your Web App. This will enable us to reach this app with computer name, instead of forcing us to usehttp://localhost

5) That’s it! Just run IIS Express: You need to open a command prompt with Administrator privileges and run the following command

“C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe” /site:YourWebAppName

Now go to Safari on OS X and run your test!

The following is a guest post by Dulio Denis and originally appeared on his blog. Dulio is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Kicking-off week 5 we started the morning with pair coding on our class App LocationQuiz.  We implemented the design we crafted on Friday – getting location venues from FourSquare and filling a new Nearest Locations Table View controller. This was a good exercise in practicing our Inter View Controller Communication as the Nearest Location needs to send its chosen venue object back to the presenting View Controller that spawned it.  Instead of implementing a delegate in the presenting controller we did this by having a property on both sides and setting that object before we popping the Nearest Location View Controller.

After some lunch at Sophie’s we went into Afternoon Lecture that covered the anatomy of a request.  This introduced networking at a broad computer science level from the abstract to the specific: from the 7-layer ISO OSI model through browser render phases and theByzantine Generals.  We discussed HTTP verbs, response codes, DNS, and even how they lay submarine cables.

We finished up by reading some of Tim Berners-Lee quotes who was of course a Cocoa man coding in Cocoa before it was called Cocoa (true NeXTStep days).

We then started a Weather App with the Weather Underground APIs. This got us to introduce NSURLConnection.  Tomorrow, we’ll continue this but start using it in the background in the data store.  This will get us to a point where we can start AFNetworking.

The following is a guest post by Dasmer Singh and originally appeared on his blog. Dasmer is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

iOS7 Custom View Controller Transitions

iOS7 Custom VC Transitions are one of the coolest additions for iOS developers. Unfortunately, there isn’t much proper documentation on how to use them to make the transitions in your app so much more magnificent.

There’s a lot of code behind making a simple transition, and to many, that may be confusing and intimidating. After playing with transitions over the past day, I came to realize that after following a simple setup procedure and copying+pasting some boilerplate code I created Custom VC Transitions are relatively simple to implement into your existing applications. I will be presenting my findings at The Flatiron School at 11 Broadway this Monday at 7:00pm. For more info about the event, check the MeetUp page:

http://www.meetup.com/NYC-NSTalks/events/145815152/

My presentation slides for the event are:

http://dasmersingh.com/flatiron/iOS7_VC_Transitions/presentation.pdf

If you do come to Monday’s MeetUp, definitely download the following Xcode Projects to follow along as I create Custom VC Transitions:

http://dasmersingh.com/flatiron/iOS7_VC_Transitions/VC_Transitions_FreshSetup.zip

http://dasmersingh.com/flatiron/iOS7_VC_Transitions/NavTransitions_FreshSetup.zipThe respective completed projects with extensive comments are posted on GitHub at:

https://github.com/Dasmer/vc_transitionshttps://github.com/Dasmer/navController-transitions

The presentation and commented code on GitHub fully explain my secret sauce to Custom View Controller Transitions. There really are just a few simple steps to creating your first iOS7 Custom View Controllers:

1. Start with a project with standard View Controller transitions (thats just about every application with more than one view controller)

2. Create an NSObject that implements the protocol. This will become the Animation Controller

3. Implement the protocol method ‘transitionDuration’ to return the length of the transition in seconds

4.Set the View Controller that presents the transition as a UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate

5. Before presenting the nextVC, set the nextVC.transitioningDelegate = self

6. Import the Animation Controller’s .h file in the presenting VC’s .m file

7. Implement the UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate methods in the presenting VC’s .m file to return an instance of the newly created Animation Controller

8. Go back to the .m file of the Animation Controller (the same file in which you implemented the ‘transitionDuration’ method) and start implementing the ‘animateTransition’ method using the following boilerplate code between the 3 dash lines:

—-

//get references to the to and from view controllers **BOILERPLATE

UIViewController *toViewController = [transitionContext viewControllerForKey:UITransitionContextToViewControllerKey]; UIViewController *fromViewController = [transitionContext viewControllerForKey:UITransitionContextFromViewControllerKey];

//get a reference to the final frame of the toViewController **BOILERPLATE

CGRect finalFrame = [transitionContext finalFrameForViewController:toViewController];

//get a reference to the transtion context’s container view (where the animation actually happens) **BOILERPLATE

UIView *containerView = [transitionContext containerView];

//add the toViewController to the transition context’s container view **BOILERPLATE

[containerView addSubview:toViewController.view];

—-

Take a step back and try to understand everything we just did. Just about every custom VC we do has just about the same procedure up till here. The next and last step differentiates one custom animation from another. It’s the most difficult step, but if you can master the previous 8 simple steps, you’re in pretty good shape.

9. After copy+pasting the boiler plate code in ‘animateTransition’, do any other pre-animation setup specific to your transition, and then create a UIView Animation to actually animate transition. You can look at my slides/GitHub to see some examples of step9 code. I’ve commented my step9 code quite thoroughly, to make it easier to understand exactly what is going on. As iOS7 documentation and forums becomes more comprehensive, there will definitely be more examples of step9 code all over the web. That’s all for now! Follow me on twitter at @DazIsBoss

The following is a guest post by Al Tyus and originally appeared on his blog. Al is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Why Use ShapeFiles?

While MapKit provides a super easy way for we dev folk to utilize geographical data in our apps, you’ll quickly realize that it doesn’t do much without a data source. In today’s post and corresponding meetup http://www.meetup.com/NYC-NSTalks/ , I’ll outline using ESRI ShapeFiles as a powerful static data source for generating MapKit Overlays.

Slides

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile

http://nsscreencast.com/episodes/66-processing-shape-files

http://cocoapods.org/?q=shapelib

The following is a guest post by Dulio Denis and originally appeared on his blog. Dulio is currently in the iOS-000 class at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Another geofencing Morning Assessment.  This time I put in a button to switch between jumping in and out of the region I set-up so I wouldn’t have to type it in the coordinates in the Emulator.

Morning Lecture today covered ARC which is the marketing name for what the Apple Xcode development team called ARR: Automatic Retain & Release – a way more descriptive name for what Automatic Reference Counting is.  I think this makes it cleared that ARR is not a form of Garbage Collection.  Why did Apple Marketing change it?  The story I heard from now-retired Apple Director Don Melton leader of the WebKit and Safari teams tell is that the development team would act like pirates whenever they talked about ARR – so marketing changed it.

Specifically, we discussed the retain cycle, why children should not strongly retain to parents, and the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing well.  This reminded me of Windows Phone 6 which had a menu bar and you had to use a stylus.  No menu bar on the iPhone in UIKit is a good thing.

After another Sophie Lunch of Beef Stew we plowed into Afternoon Lecture with UI Tricks of the Trade.  We took a look at a random palette generator at 80×15.com. These are great designed palette color schemes which color hex codes. What do you do with the hex code you ask – why put it through a UIColor Code Generator. Next we enhanced Navigation Bars by setting tints, translucency, and title text attributes. We then went back to the Visit Charlotte App from Day 11 which we changed to the Visit New York App. Today, we went in to enhance the UI of the App.

We had Jeff Holliday CTO of brainscape come in for a guest lecture entitled “Reducing Dependencies in Objective-C.”  This reinforced the Morning Lecture and Jeff showed some sample code he had brought along.   

Jeff discussed four standard ways to break down dependencies:

KV Broadcasting/Observing

Blocks

NSNotifications

Delegate Patterns

Jeff spent the lecture on the delegate patterns: defining that this is a technique to remove dependencies between objects and explained that the delegate pattern is the method Apple favors the most in their bag of software engineering patterns.

He described the three opportunities of when it makes sense to use the delegate pattern:

When you have a circular dependency,

When you want a reusable class,

When you have an asynchronous interaction with outside objects.

In Q&A Jeff revealed he was a big proponent of the Freemium App Model (in the absence of App Trials): make it free and kill with in-app purchases.

After the guest lecture concluded we dove into more Afternoon Lecture with Custom View Table Cells in the Senari App by adding custom table view cells with switches, steppers, and labels both by making a XIB and then doing it with a Storyboard.

We then went back to finish yesterday’s lab of the LocationQuiz before the big event of the night: the First Flatiron iOS Meet-up. Al presented not only ShapeLib MapKit Polygon fun but also showed off CocoaPods and his own passion project of GeoMatch.