New HttpClient in Angular 4.3.x DRYs up Network Calls AND Testing
Find out how the new HttpClient in Angular 4.3.1+ helps you write less code and test your services more easily.
UITableView Swipe Actions in iOS 11
Overview One of the new but little discussed APIs in iOS 11 allows the addition of swipe actions on UITableView rows via the new UISwipeActionsConfiguration class and associated UITableViewDelegate methods. Adding swipe left or swipe right actions is now pretty simple, so lets just dive right in. To try out these new APIs, a very basic list view was created with some hard coded data. This app will allow the user to swipe right to make a row “read” or…
NSAttributedString Enhancements in iOS 11
Attributed strings can be a pain to configure the way you want them. The attributes dictionary has always been a dictionary comprised of String-Any pairs. There have been some nice enhancments in iOS 11, though.
Large Titles For Navigation Bars In iOS 11
If you have played with iOS 11 either on a simulator or on a real device, you have probably noticed that most of the first party apps, such as Mail and Settings, use large titles in the navigation bar. We are going to look at how to implement the same navigation bar behavior in our apps.
Updating text on a Loading spinner with Ionic 3
Ionic has a handy Loading component, typically used to display a spinner and message while some network operation completes or some other work goes on in the background. It works well for simple operations, but falls down for dynamic or multi-step operations. For instance, when you call the LoadingController to set things up, you can specify the content that the loading screen will display: const loading = this.loadingCtrl.create({ content: ‘Please wait…’ }); loading.present(); However, you can’t go much further. This…
AWS: Overview of IAM
Have you ever read something like this in the AWS documentation? “When you attach policy to a user, the user is the implicit principal. When you attach a permission policy to an IAM role, the principal identified in the role’s trust policy gets the permissions.” I spent a while trying to wrap my mind around offhand statements like that, with a lot of guesswork and without much luck. First off, IAM stands for Identity and Access Management. It turns out,…
Changing your iOS App Icon programatically
When iOS 10.3 was released, Apple opened up an API to allow developers to change the app icon for their app programatically. Of course this doesn’t mean you can change it every second like the Clock app, or even every day like the Calendar app. What you can do is change the app icon when the app is running in the foreground, and it will notify the user with a pretty ugly system alert dialog that the icon is changing….
Handling Keyboard Shortcuts In iOS
The keyboard is an enormously important piece of hardware. The keyboard lets us increase efficiency while using an app by typing faster. It also gives iOS apps the ability to support shortcuts, which increases productivity even more. Common tasks for apps would be greatly benefited by allowing shortcuts, especially on an iPad, by allowing the user to keep their hands on the keyboard.
Real World Spark Lessons
I recently built a Spark job that runs every morning to collect the previous day’s data from a few different datasources, join some reference data, perform a few aggregations and write all of the results to Cassandra. All in roughly three minutes (not too shabby).
Enabling Siri Integration With SiriKit
SiriKit was created for developers in iOS 10. However, there were, and still are, a limited number of intent domains with which you can integrate an app. An intent domain is simply a category of app that can take advantage of Siri. With the release of iOS 11, a few new domains are being made available. This tutorial will walk through implementing SiriKit with the “Lists and Notes” domain, although, the core concepts can be applied to any domain.