Ios-Academy on blog.iankulin.com

Calculator

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The app I’m working on currently (for multiplication tables practice) has a number type keypad and display a bit like a calculator - but for entering the answers. It’s been quite fun to think through all the little problems to make it work how you’d expect, so I was quite interested to watch an iOS Academy video where Afraz Siddiqui builds a partially finished SwiftUI version of the iOS Calculator app.

It is a great example for beginners to see the power of building views quickly in SwiftUI, but the most fun part for me was thinking of all the edge cases that would hadn’t been dealt with in his quick build out of the logic (which wasn’t the point of the video).

A couple of times I’ve thought about building copies of existing Apple iOS apps. I think part of the appeal is that the design work is done for me, so I’m just thinking about under the hood. Long term, I need to know more about design and to be better at it - I bet there’s a Meng To course that would be a good starting point.

iOS Academy

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A YouTube channel worth subscribing to is Afraz Siddiqui’s iOS Academy. He does a great videos on iOS development. My favouriets might be the shorter focussed ones, like this one on the new SwiftUI chart views.

iOS Academy

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I seem to consume a lot of iOS Academy videos with great, short (< 10 minute) explanations of various Swift iOS programming topics - particularly little UI topics, like this one on the Grid View.

I really appreciate the generous content provision in the Swift and iOS development community. Perhaps this is the same for lots of technologies, but for someone who started programming pre-internet, it’s a stark difference to how I used to learn - so many magazines, and so many 2" thick books.

Closures

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I had one of those synchronicity in learning moments this morning. I am reading The Swift Book - ie The Swift Programming Language, Swift 5.7 as part of my cs193p homework, and this morning, in a coffee shop was admiring what a clear, well written explanation was given for closures. It is super well written, stepping the reader through in logical (and digestible) steps.

If you’ve never carelessly passed around a pointer to a function and caused the Blue Screen of Death, or done much multi-threaded programming, the use-case for closures, and use of them is going to be challenging at first. Then Swift’s ability to cut the syntax down to very little will be challenging.

By pure coincidence, on the way home (it’s the country - you have time to listen to most of a podcast on the drive home from town) I listened to Fireside Swift podcast episode 7 which was also about closures.

The to top it off, I sat down to lunch with this video which is part of iOS Academy’s Swift for Beginners (2022) playlist.