Tuesday 27 December 2016

Integrate third party library in an iOS project:


In iOS app development we need many other libraries to be included in our app to accomplish set of task. There are number of ways by which we can include these library  in our project .

1) Using Cocoapods 

Cocoa pod is dependency manager . It is very simple to add library this way . Go to project directory and follow these steps:

a) Run pod init  command
    The above command will initialize the pod in project directory and creates a pod file. 
b) Now open the pod file and add  required library in this file . And save the file .
c) Run pod install command .
    This will install the library in project directory  and creates a xcworkspace  file in project directory .

     From now open the xcworkspace instead of Xcode project . 

2) Manually:

Using this way , we just drag and drop the required files/folder of required library to our project.

3) using git sub module:


Using this way we add a third party project using git command . This command will add third party library as a submodule in our project.

a) Go to your project directory , initialize git if git is not initialized in project directory .
      
     git init 
   
 b) git submodule add  project-url

    The above command will add third party library at given url as a sub module in our project .


Thursday 8 December 2016

Manage navigation controller

In iOS app development UINavigationController play a vital role . As we all know UINavigationController keeps the stack of view controller when we use in our app for transition among view controllers .

We face many problems related to UINavigationController like change appearance of the navigation bar, add UIBarButton items to navigation bar , combine the status bar with navigation bar and some others. All these tasks seem very easy at first look but it depends on our requirements .

In my recent app I want to use the navigation bar with two buttons (left and right bar button item)in all view controller and also want the color of status bar and navigation bar should be same . 

1) To change the appearance of the UINaviagtionBar, we can code in our AppDelegate this will reflect in all view controllers: 

    var navBarAppearance = UINavigationBar.appearance()

    navBarAppearance.tintColor = UIColor.white

    navBarAppearance.barTintColor  = UIColor.init(red: 73/255.0, green: 180/255.0, blue: 255/255.0, alpha: 1)

 a) Here tintColor attribute will change the background color of the navigation bar .
 b) Bar tint color will change the color of button titles and  button images.

The above two properties won't change the color of the title of the navigation bar. To change the color of the title use this line of code:
   
   navBarAppearance.titleTextAttributes = [NSForegroundColorAttributeName:UIColor.white]


 2) Change the status bar color:

  UIApplication.shared.statusBarStyle = .lightContent

This will not change the color of the status bar. To reflect the change we need to make one more change in our info.plist file:
set UIViewControllerBasedAppearance to false

3) Add bar button items to all view controller: This was my requirement to have two buttons in navigation bar in all view controllers: I can not achieve this like appearance. Because bar buttons are added to navigation item property of the view controller. Each view controller have its own navigation item . 
So to add bar  buttons to all view controller:

a) Add in viewDidLoad() of each view controller
b) Make a Utility class and add a class function to it and call this from each view controller's viewDidLoad() or any other methods of view life cycle as per your need .
c) Make an separate subclass of UIViewController and add two bar buttons here in this class and change the super class of your view controller from UIViewController to one you created previous .

I will  choose the last approach. Add this code in your subclass:
     let leftBtn = UIBarButtonItem(image: UIImage(named:"back_btn_icon"), style: .plain, target: self, action: #selector(backBtnTapped))
   self.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = leftBtn

    let rightBtn = UIBarButtonItem(image: UIImage(named:"setting_icon"), style: .plain, target: self, action: #selector(settingBtnTapped))

    self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = rightBtn

What if one of your view controller need only one bar button. It's easy we can hide the unwanted button:
 To hide the left button add this line your view controller:

self.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItems?.remove(at: 0)



Reference: Stackoverflow and https://coderwall.com



Friday 2 December 2016

Set attributed text in interface builder

 1) Increase font size as size of UILabel increases:

There may be a requirement to increase the font size as the size of UILabel increases.To see this in action, Open Xcode and switch to xib/storyboard file and follow these steps:

Take a UILabel and  set height of the UILabel to the proportional to the height of screen . and set other required constraint on UILabel.
Then set some properties of UILabel to have font size proportional to the size of UILabel.

a) Set AutoShrink to minimum font size
b) set number of lines to 0
c) set the font size bigger as the maximum size of UILabel .


2) Set Attributed text in interface builder for a UILabel:

We can set attributed text programatically by setting different attributes like font, color, size on a attributed string(instance of NSAttributedString) . But there is an easy way , we can create an attributed text without typing even a single line of code.

We can create an attributed text in interface builder. To set attributed text for a UILabel :

a) Change text type  plain to attributed  in the attributes inspector window.
b) Then type the string as your requirements.
c) Then select  word you want to change the appearance  of and change it's size, font family, color etc.