iOS Programming 101: Simple Animation Using UIImageView

March 31, 2013 By 8 Comments

As you may know, we have released our first iOS game on App Store. Honestly, we do not have any game development experience. As we always said, “getting your hands dirty is the best way to learn programming”.

We started out by developing a simple memory game. We’re sure that it won’t be a big hit. However, it’s a great learning experience even the game do not generate good money. In coming tutorials, we’ll share with you some of the implementation techniques such as game center integration, in-app purchase implementation, Nextpeer integration for multiplayer support, etc. To start off, let’s see how you can use UIImageView to implement simple animation.

simple animation
[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101, Tutorials Tagged With: , ,

iOS Programming 101: Record and Play Audio using AVFoundation Framework

February 27, 2013 By 9 Comments

Editor’s note: Some of you asked us to write a tutorial about audio recording. This week, we work with Yiqi Shi and Raymond from Purple Development to give you an introduction of AVFoundation framework. Yiqi and Raymond are independent iOS developers and have recently released Voice Memo Wifi that allows users to record voice memo and share it over WiFi.

iOS provides various framework to let you work with sound in your app. One of the frameworks that you can use to play and record audio file is the AV Foundation Framework. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the basics of the framework and show you how to manage audio playback, as well as, recording.

To provide you with a working example, I’ll build a simple audio app that allows users to record and play audio. Our primary focus is to demonstrate the AV Foundation framework so the user interface of the app is very simple.

The AV Foundation provides easy ways to deal with audio. In this tutorial, we mainly deal with these two classes:

  • AVAudioPlayer – think of it as an audio player for playing sound files. By using the player, you can play sounds of any duration and in any audio format available in iOS.
  • AVAudioRecorder – an audio recorder for recording audio

[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101 Tagged With: , , ,

iOS Programming 101: Customize UITableView and UITableViewCell Background using Storyboard

January 6, 2013 By 25 Comments

In the last tutorial of our iOS Programming 101 series, we showed you how to customize the navigation bar and buttons with your own background image. This time, we’ll look into the customization and styling of UITableView and UITableViewCell.

If you’ve followed our iOS tutorials from the very beginning, you know we’ve written a tutorial about customizing table view cell using Interface Builder. In this tutorial, we’ll do something different. Instead of using Interface Builder to tweak the UITableViewCell, we’ll show you how to use Storyboards to style the cell. Storyboards make customizing table cells much easier with the introduction of prototype cell. In brief, you’ll learn the following stuffs in this tutorial:

  1. Customizing UITableViewCell using Storyboard
  2. Style UITableViewCell and UITableView with your own background images

[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101, Tutorials Tagged With: , , ,

iOS Programming 101: How to Customize Navigation Bar and Back Button

December 29, 2012 By 15 Comments

Previously, in our iOS Programming 101 series, we showed you how to customize the appearance of the Tab Bar. In this tutorial, we’ll continue to talk about UI customization and cover how to use Appearance API to make the Navigation Bar more beautiful.

Here are what you’ll learn in this tutorial:

  1. Customizing the View with background image
  2. Customizing UINavigationBar including background image and text style of title
  3. Customizing the appearance of UIBarButtonItem

As usual, we’re going to illustrate the concept by converting a plain navigation bar to one with customized graphics. However, to help you focus on learning the customization, we’ve prepared the Xcode project for you to start with. Before proceeding, first download the Xcode project here (note: the project is created using Xcode 4.5).

If you build and run the project, you’ll get an app with simple navigation UI. Now we’ll work together to style the navigation bar, customize the bar buttons and assign our own background image for the view.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101 Tagged With: , , , ,

iOS Programming 101: How To Customize Tab Bar Background and Appearance

December 2, 2012 By 11 Comments

With over 700,000 apps in App Store, your app must have a great design to stand out from others. If your app is still using the default design, you better give it a tweak and make it look better. I’m sure it’ll improve your app sales and attract more downloads.

When you check out any popular app, you’ll notice a custom design tab bar. Some readers asked how we can change the appearance of the tab bar. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to do that. With the introduction of Appearance API in iOS 5, it’s much easier to custom the UI controls that gives your app a unique look and feel.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101 Tagged With: , , , , , ,

iOS Programming 101: Integrate Twitter and Facebook Sharing in Your App

November 22, 2012 By 19 Comments

Following the Twitter support in iOS 5, Apple added the support of Facebook in iOS 6. In the past, developers have to make use of the Facebook and Twitter API to integrate the sharing feature in their apps. With the built-in support, it’s much easier to add these social features to your own app.

In this short tutorial, we will show you how to build Twitter and Facebook sharing feature in your app. As usual, we’ll build a simple app together as we believe there is no better way to teach programming than “get your hand dirty”.

Social Framework in iOS 6

The iOS 6 introduces a new framework known as the “Social Framework”. The Social framework lets you integrate your app with any supported social networking services. Presently, it supports Facebook, Twitter and Sina Weibo. The framework gives you a standard interface to interact with different social networks and it shields you from learning the internals. You don’t have to worry about the Twitter/Facebook APIs, how to handle network connection, handle single sign-on, etc. The social framework simplifies everything. You just need to write a few lines of code to bring up the composer and users can tweet / publish Facebook post within your app.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101 Tagged With: , , , , ,

iOS Programming 101: Intro to MapKit API and Add an Annotation on Map

October 14, 2012 By 26 Comments

A month ago, we covered how to use Core Location framework to retrieve the user’s location. We also showed you how to convert the GPS coordinate into an address. However, the best way to show a location is to pin it on map. Thanks to the MapKit API. It lets programmers easily work with the built-in Maps and pin a location.

The Map Kit framework provides an interface for embedding maps directly into your own windows and views. This framework also provides support for annotating the map, adding overlays, and performing reverse-geocoding lookups to determine placemark information for a given map coordinate.
- iOS Developer Reference

MapKit is a neat API, comes with the iOS SDK, that allows you to display maps, navigate through maps, add annotations for specific locations, add overlays on existing maps, etc. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you though the basics of the API and show you how to place a pin on the map. As usual, rather than going through the theory, we’ll work on a simple app. Through the practice, we hope you’ll get a better idea about MapKit.

Let’s get started.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101, Tutorials Tagged With: , , , , , ,

iOS Programming 101: How To Get the User Location in iPhone App

September 9, 2012 By 25 Comments

This is the third article of the iOS Programming 101 series. In the previous two articles, we showed you how to hide the tab bar and implement email feature in your app. In this article, we’ll show you how to add GPS capability in your iPhone app and retrieve the user’s current location. We’ll even cover tip to translate the GPS coordinate into street address. It’s gonna to be fun and pretty easy to implement.

Location services provide a way to improve your app by enhancing the user experience. If you’re developing a travel app, you can base on the users’ current location to search for nearby restaurants or hotels. You can also find the location feature in most of the Photo apps that saves where the pictures are taken. The Core Location framework provides the necessary Objective-C interfaces for obtaining information about the user’s location. With the GPS coordinate obtained, you can make use of the API to decode the actual street or utilize the Map framework to further display the location on Map.

In this tutorial, we’ll build a simple app to show you how to use the Core Location framework. Here are the things we’ll do:

  • Build a simple interface to display the GPS coordinate and address
  • Learn how to use the Core Location APIs to retrieve the current location
  • Utilize the built-in APIs to translate the GPS coordinates into street address

Okay, let’s get started.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101, Tutorials Tagged With: , , , , ,

iOS Programming 101: How To Send Email in Your iPhone App

July 29, 2012 By 32 Comments

Here comes another tutorial for our iOS Programming 101 series. Last time, we show you how to hide tab bar in navigation interface. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how easy you can let user send email in your app.

The iOS SDK has made it really easy to send email using the built-in APIs. With a few line of codes, you can launch the same email interface as the stock Mail app that lets you compose an email. In this tutorial, we’ll build a very simple app to show you how to send both plain text and HTML email using the iOS SDK.

SimpleEmail Tutorial Logo
[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101, Tutorials Tagged With: , , , , ,

iOS Programming 101: How To Hide Tab Bar in Navigation Interface

July 15, 2012 By 14 Comments

Appcoda started out with weekly tutorials to show you how to build an app. The weekly tutorials are very detailed with step by step procedures. So far the feedbacks about the tutorials and our free iOS development course are very positive. But some readers suggested us to take one step further and create mini tutorials to answer some common iOS development questions such as how to change the color of navigation bar or color of UIbutton. Thanks for the suggestions. From this week onwards, we’ll start a new series – iOS Programming 101. Every week, we’ll publish a short tutorial to answer a common question raised in the comment area or forum.

As a fresh start of the series, we’ll show you how to hide the tab bar in a navigation-based app. Several weeks ago, we developed the tab bar app. In that tutorial, we embed the navigation controller inside the tab bar controller. So when user taps on any of the recipes, the navigation controller pushes to the detail view.

Tab Bar App with Tab Bar in Detail View

Tab Bar App with Tab Bar in Detail View


[Read more...]

Filed Under: iOS Programming 101, Tutorials Tagged With: , ,