iOS 10 Swift Programming Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for iOS Apps

852 Pages·2016·16.19 MB·English

by  Vandad Nahavandipoor

iOS 10 Swift Programming Cookbook
Solutions and Examples for iOS Apps
Vandad Nahavandipoor
iOS 10 Swift Programming Cookbook
by Vandad Nahavandipoor Copyright © 2017 Vandad Nahavandipoor. All rights
reserved.
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December 2016: First Edition
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978-1-49196643-3
[LSI]
Preface
Along with the typical upgrades and shiny new features of every release, iOS 10
offers two major, possibly game-changing opportunities that demonstrate its
movement toward integration and enabling extensions. First, it has opened up
Siri for developers. This gives us a world of voice interfaces to explore, such as
creating fitness applications entirely controlled by Siri, or creating financial
applications that allow the receiving and sending of payments from and to
others.
Apple has also opened up iMessage as a service to us developers, meaning that
you can now write applications that allow users to send custom stickers
(including animated stickers) to one another. What’s even better is that iMessage
has become a lot more interactive, allowing users to react to messages they
receive and attaching pre-built stickers to the messages.
This book has been updated with a lot of new material for you, and all existing
recipes from iOS 9 Swift Programming Cookbook have been brought up to date
to use Swift 3 and Xcode 8. Swift 3’s new features and syntax have also been
discussed so that you not only get a good idea of what is new in iOS 10 SDK,
but also learn about the language you will use to write your apps.
I’ve had a lot of fun writing this book and I really hope that you’ll enjoy reading
it.
Audience
I assume that you are comfortable writing iOS apps, at least know your way
around Xcode, and can work with the simulator. This book is not for beginners.
If you have never programmed in Xcode before for iOS, it will be tough to learn
iOS programming only from this book. So I suggest that you complement your
skills with other online resources. The intended audience for this book is
intermediate and advanced users.
I also assume that you have written a little bit of Swift code. In this book, I use
Swift 2 and will teach you some of the concepts, but if you don’t know Swift,
this is not the right place to start. If you’re just starting out, pick up Apple’s book
on Swift programming first; once you’ve read through it and are a bit more
comfortable with Swift, come back to this book and I’m sure you’ll learn a lot of
new things, even about Swift 2.
Organization of This Book
Here I’ll explain what each chapter is about so that you’ll get a feeling for what
this book is going to teach you:
Chapter 1, iMessage Stickers and Apps
iOS 10 opens the doors to developers to create sticker pack applications for
iMessage. Sticker packs are extensions that you can distribute either as part
of your iOS applications or as standalone applications. They allow you to
add interactions to messages being sent and received in iMessage
conversations. In this chapter, we will discuss different types of these
extensions and how you can create interactive sticker pack applications for
iMessage.
Chapter 2, SiriKit
Since its introduction, Siri has been an integral part of iOS and how people
interact with the operating system. However, because it was a closed
technology, we developers couldn’t integrate our apps into Siri. That’s not
the case anymore. Now you can write your own app extensions that
integrate into Siri and allow you to interpret various “intents” that come
from Siri into your applications. For instance, you can create a financial
application that allows the user to send and receive money from various
sources, all driven through Siri. In this chapter, you will see how to create
one of these extensions and learn the different entry points from Siri into
your application.
Chapter 3, Measurements and Units
This chapter is dedicated to the new series of classes and structures that
Apple has provided to developers to convert betweeen various
measurements and units.
Chapter 4, Core Data
Core Data is without a doubt the standard and best way to store large
amounts of data, and structure your data object models, in an iOS
application. Previous versions of this book included a chapter about Core
Data, but that chapter was intentionally removed in the iOS 9 edition,
because it had been present in the book since the iOS 6 edition with little
alteration. In this edition of the book, I have rewritten this chapter with
fresh and new information so that you can enjoy storing data in your iOS
apps, knowing you are using the latest APIs.
Chapter 5, Swift 3.0, Xcode 8, and Interface Builder
In this chapter, we take a look at a lot of new stuff in Swift, Xcode, and
Interface Builder (IB), such as the addition of the guard keyword to Swift
and conditionally extending types with Swift’s new runtime features. Swift
has really matured with Swift 3, and I want to share some of the most
important additions with you.
Chapter 6, The User Interface
This year’s WWDC has put playgrounds under the spotlight and given them
some long-needed attention. Playgrounds can now work just like an iOS
application, in that they can have a main loop and allow you to
continuously change and modify your code while it is running in the
background, compiling your changes continuously and displaying the
results without you having to press the play button. This chapter looks at
these additions to playgrounds as well as other UI components and
technologies that might interest you while developing modern iOS apps.
Chapter 7, Apple Watch
This year, unlike the last, Apple didn’t focus as much on watchOS.
However, there are exciting new ways of interacting with watchOS, which
we will talk about and discuss in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Contacts
The contacts APIs will be discussed in this chapter. You’ll learn how to use
the contacts framework to add new contacts to the user’s device, remove
contacts, edit them, or even allow the user to pick a contact from the list so
that you can perform your tasks on it — all without having to fiddle with
low-level C APIs.
Chapter 9, Extensions
The Safari Content Blocker extension allows developers to create apps that
get installed as extensions on the user’s Safari browser, and allows us to
block various elements of web pages that the user views. For instance, you
can now block pictures or various unwanted elements in the websites that
you specify in your app, and you can share these content blockers with
those who use your app. This chapter is all about these extension points that
you can add to your apps.
Chapter 10, Web and Search
Apps can now provide content to iOS for indexing in the device’s search
engine. iOS will then index these contents and allow the user to search for
them right within Spotlight on their devices. Your contents can also be
indexed globally on Apple’s servers so even those who don’t have your app
can see your content on their devices. Intrigued? Read this chapter, then!
Chapter 11, Multitasking
In iOS, we have the ability to provide Picture in Picture (PiP) to our users.
Your app can provide a video player to iOS and allow the user to minimize
your whole app into that video player while she works with other apps. It’s
really cool, in my opinion!
Chapter 12, Maps and Location
With the additions to Core Location and MapKit frameworks, you can, for
example, display an ETA for transit between two locations or display your
custom view inside the annotation of a pin on the map.
Chapter 13, UI Testing
We will discuss Apple’s UI Testing framework in this chapter. I’ll show
you how to write native Swift code to do UI testing.
Chapter 14, Core Motion
Core Motion is also available on watchOS. In this chapter, you’ll learn
some of the new things that you can do with this framework, including
reading cadence information from sensors on the device.
Chapter 15, Security
ATS in iOS forces all requests to go through HTTPS. If you build your
project with the latest Xcode and iOS SDK, all your network requests will
go through HTTPS by default, protecting your content and possibly
breaking a few things if you don’t support HTTPS in your web services.
Read this chapter to learn more.
Chapter 16, Multimedia
iOS 10 adds some new ways for apps to interact with Siri’s voice, and you
can read about them in this chapter.
Chapter 17, UI Dynamics
Last but not least, there are some amazing effects that you can achieve in
your user interface with UI Dynamics, including the ability to create
turbulence or magnetic fields. In this chapter, we’ll review some examples
that show these effects in action.