Swift Snippet : Map Bool values with Generics in Swift

My problem

It often occurs while writing code that you need to assign a value of a certain type, based on the value of Boolean. To do this there are multiple ways, but the 2 most known are

1. The let’s-write-a-lot-of-code approach

let isAWildBoolean = true

// Set the value of `offSet` to a value based on the Boolean
let offSet:Int

if isAWildBoolean {
    
    offSet = 10
    
} else {
    
    offSet = 20
    
}

I don’t like the first approach, because it creates a bloated codebase. A better way is to use the ternary operator (also known as the inline-if).

2. The one-line-star-developer (ternary operator) approach

You specify the Boolean you want to evaluate, add a question mark, followed by the value if the Boolean is true, followed by a colon, followed by the value if the Boolean is false.

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Integrate Unity 5 in a native iOS app with Xcode 7

Integrate Unity 5 in a native iOS app

A few months back I published a blog post about how to integrate Unity3D within a native iOS application.  This tutorial was written for Xcode 6 & Unity 4 and in the comments there were a lot of requests for a new tutorial.

Tonight I found the time to make the video tutorial on how to integrate Unity 5 in a native iOS app with Xcode 7, so I hope you enjoy it!

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3D touch peek and pop tutorial for your Swift application

3D Touch peek and pop tutorial

Apple added a touch-sensitive layer to the screen of the brand new iPhone 6s (plus).  With the coming of this new screen, they’ve added some new UI interactions like application shortcuts and peek and pop.

In this 3D touch peek and pop tutorial I will learn you how to implement this new way of interacting with your content by building a photo gallery.  When you press hard on the screen you’ll see a preview of the image and if you press really hard the preview will pop into a detail view.

At the end of this tutorial I’ll show you how to add preview actions. This way you can interact with the content without going to the detail view.  You can do this by swiping up while you are previewing the content.

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TouchID authentication tutorial for Swift

TouchID

A few years ago Apple introduced TouchID on the iPhone5S. Instead of asking your user for a password, you can just ask for their fingerprint (if their device has TouchID) which improves the UX by a gazillion times.

With the introduction of iOS7, it was impossible for a developer to use the fingerprint sensor for authentication. Luckily in iOS8, Apple provided us with an API to do so.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can integrate TouchID authentication in your application.

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Add 3D Touch quick actions tutorial

3d touch quick actions tutorial

With the introduction of the iPhone 6S (plus), Apple added a pressure-sensitive layer to their screen.  This creates a bunch of new UX possibilities for creating apps.  It’s possible to do a hard press on an application icon and get shortcuts which take you to a specific point in your app.  For example, if you do a hard-press on the Photo’s app icon you can quickly search for an image, check the most recent images or see your favourites.  It’s also possible to make these quick actions dynamic, meaning that you can add and remove actions based on the state of your application.

3D touch quick actions
3D touch quick actions

In this tutorial I will show you how you can add these quick actions to your application icon.

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Sandbox Unity app in an existing iOS app

I HAVE CREATED A NEW WAY TO INTEGRATE UNITY WITHIN AN EXISTING IOS APP. YOU CAN FIND THE POST HERE.

The problem

After my previous blog post on how to sandbox an iOS app inside of a Unity project, I got some questions on how to do the same but put Unity inside of an existing iOS app.

After playing around with it, I found a solution which works well for me to add Unity app in an existing iOS app.

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Call methods on Unity3D straight from your Objective-C code

The problem

So you want to trigger functionality in your Unity3D scene straight from your native Objective-C code?  For example you have different scenes, and you want a regular iOS component (e.g. UIButton) to trigger a new scene. It takes some work, but it is doable.

tl;dr

Read it … bitch 🙂

The solution

Unity exposes a way to call code in your Unity3D project (normally this will be javascript or C#).  There are 3 components you need to get in place.

  1. Have a Unity3D scene
  2. Have a Unity3D script
  3. Have an Objective-C class

The way it works is that you can bridge your code from Objective-C to C# or Javascript in Unity3D with the ‘UnitySendMessage’ method.

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Add Unity3D in a native iOS application

I HAVE CREATED A NEW WAY TO INTEGRATE UNITY WITHIN AN EXISTING IOS APP. YOU CAN FIND THE POST HERE.

The problem

For a project I need to implement an augmented reality feature inside a native iOS application.  We chose to go with Unity3D and Vuforia to do the augmented reality bit, as it’s free and lots of people are saying it’s the best solution. The only problem when working with Unity3D is that the exported iOS project is not easy to implement in an existing project as we only need Unity3D for 2 views inside a project with some dozen other native UIViews. Continue reading Add Unity3D in a native iOS application

National Geographic UIKit Animation transition demo

This afternoon Thomas Degry (one of my students, www.devine.be) asked how he could program the neat little effect they use in the National Parks iPad app made for National Geographic. If you want to see the effect yourself, I suggest you download the app to check it out. Just select one of the parcs and then tap on the stats or the weather button. You’ll see a nice transition in which the master view ‘steps’ into the background, while the new content is placed in front of it.

It took me a few minutes of tapping to see how the animation works, so here is how you can mimic the effect. Just play with CALayers and some transformations 🙂

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Add CKEditor to CakePHP with model validation

Yesterday I had a very frustrating issue implementing CKEditor (an awesome open-source WYSIWYG editor) in a CakePHP 2.3.2 installation. I thought the issue had something to do with CakePHP … ow boy, was I wrong 🙂

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