Making graphs and charts accessible — part one — Apple is known for great accessibility. iOS became even more accessible for visually impaired users with the new Audio Graphs feature introduced in iOS 15. This tutorial covers everything you need to know to get started with Audio Graphs for your iOS app. We’ll look at what Audio Graphs are…

Apps help creating better Apps! — There are a lot of apps and tools out there promising to help us develop amazing apps. Let’s look through some of the really useful ones I use frequently! 1. Xcodes The easiest way to install and switch between multiple versions of Xcode. We all know the struggle. Supporting many Xcode versions…

Creating a resizable and reusable view for a macOS app Creating a macOS app allows us to use a whole different set of tools than creating an iOS app. In this article we’ll look at one example of a view we can only use at the mac: A Tag Cloud…

Using UndoManager to create an Undoable History — Undo and redo are two common functions found in many apps and your users may expect it in your app as well. Whenever it’s possible to manipulate data, your users will be grateful when they can undo their errors. Imagine using Xcode without the possibility to undo your latest change…

Inspecting the content of a Swift source file in Swift — SourceKitten is an open-source project to parse the content of and get detailed information about a Swift file. It’s used in many tools you may use regularly, like SwiftLint and Jazzy. When looking at its readme file, it seems like it’s only a command-line tool. However, SourceKitten also includes a…

How to draw with your finger and export an image — In this short article, we will explore how to add a view to our apps, where users can draw with their finger. Creating a drawing is quite easy. First, we will see how to get the positions of touches and track movements. The next step is to connect these points…

How to use and convert units in a type-safe way — Whenever we are dealing with measurements in our apps and need to convert one unit to another (e.g. an imperial unit like inches to a metric unit like meters), we can write the conversion ourselves. However, this can get quite complicated and error-prone. Instead, Apple provides a convenient way of…

Add a show/hide password button to your password text field — Many big apps — like YouTube, Twitter, and Amazon — allow their users to switch between a secured text field and a normal text field whenever a password needs to be entered. This is a good user experience because it’ll be very frustrating for your users to need multiple tries…

Splitting your views for more functionality — Many macOS apps — like Safari, Finder, Mail, and Xcode — use split views to divide their content into separate areas. This allows a user to decide how to size different parts of the app themselves. Coming from an iOS background, I was surprised how many fewer references, articles, and…