Coding Explorer Blog

Getting Started With UITableView in Swift

Last updated on August 12, 2020

One of the most common Views used in iOS apps is the UITableView. In the default iPhone apps alone, the only ones that I didn’t easily find what is PROBABLY a UITableView was in Newsstand, Videos, Camera, and the Calculator. Even then, the first two of those appear to use UITableView’s close cousin UICollectionView. With the exception of the Settings app itself, I wasn’t even counting their settings pages (which probably all of them have, and show up as a UITableView either in their own app or via the Settings app).

You probably want to know how to use such an important view? There is too much to go into all of it today, but let’s start out with how to get one working and fill it with data.
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How to Create a UIColor in Swift

Last updated on August 12, 2020

There comes a time in many iOS developers’s careers that they will need to save a reference to a color itself. Maybe it is just to change the background color of a view, maybe it is for custom drawing, or any number of other reasons.

This is where UIColor comes in. UIColor is particularly optimized to work on iOS devices, so while there are older similar classes like CGColor or CIColor, you should probably use UIColor, unless you are working on some app that needs to translate between different colorspaces.
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Segue between Swift View Controllers

Last updated on August 12, 2020

So, last time we learned how to make a simple Hello World app on a single view controller. As fancy as it was, you probably want more than one screen in your app, right?

Perhaps you want a way to segue into the next screen?

That’s what we’re going to go over today, as well as one of the simple ways to share data between view controllers.
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Hello World! Your first iOS App in Swift

Last updated on August 12, 2020

So far we’ve covered a lot of how Swift the language works, some WatchKit tutorials, and how to get started with some Cocoa classes. However, we have not really done much in the way of actually writing sample apps on the Coding Explorer Blog. It was covered a little bit in the WatchKit tutorials, but there is a lot done there specific to getting WatchKit working. Let’s go all the way back to the basics, let’s write a Hello World app.

For those that don’t know, it is very common to have the first program written by somebody learning a new language be one that somehow displays “Hello World!” At least according to Wikipedia, this goes back to an example from “The C Programming Language” book by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. Now, of course the simplest form of this in Swift is just:

print("Hello, World!")

But we’ll do something a bit more advanced than that. You don’t often (or ever) see a console on your iOS device, so that doesn’t help us make an app directly.

This is a pretty basic tutorial, but I want to make it pretty comprehensive for how to start an iOS app. This will even include going over some of the features of the IDE (integrated Development Environment), like the different editors, the utility pane, and the various inspectors therein. This may be a bit too basic for some, but I want this site to be a place for all kinds of iOS developers, especially the beginners. We all had to start sometime, and those are the people I want to help in particular today.

Also, I figured that it’s a new year, let’s start it with how to start a new app.
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Swiftly getting a human-readable date with NSDateFormatter

Last updated on May 23, 2023

Now that we know a bit about Date and DateComponents, let’s actually get a readable date in our Swift app, shall we? This is the job of DateFormatter. DateFormatter is a class that can take a Date, and output a String describing that time/date as its format instructions dictate. In other words, you tell it what you want to know, and it will give you a String that says that. It has a few pretty useful built-in formats, and the capability to accept a custom date format string.

There’s not too much to the actual creation of an DateFormatter object. It pretty much just has an empty initializer (and an NSCoding one, but we aren’t covering NSCoding today). After initializing your DateFormatter, you set the appropriate style for the date and time, and that’s all you need.
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