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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.

Implementing Handoff In iOS and macOS

Handoff is a neat feature that was introduced in iOS 8 and macOS (then OS X) v10.10. This capability allows an app to pass data across macOS and iOS devices so that a task started on one device can be completed on another device. In this tutorial we will implement Handoff on both iOS and macOS platforms.

Alexa adds Device Identity

We have an Alexa project where we’re using Alexa to control physical devices in the room. In a deployment, there are multiple devices in multiple rooms. But these devices aren’t lights or thermostats, so they aren’t yet candidates for the Alexa Smart Home API. A few months ago, it looked like we would have to create dozens of cloned Amazon accounts, one for each room, in order to be able to distinguish one Alexa device from another. Happily, Alexa has…

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