Category: Posts

  • Using AI to Generate Icons

    Since I have minimal design skills, I went back to Fiverr (the digital gig economy platform) to get some icons done for CodeTrimmer – explaining that I wanted something like a “pair of scissors floating over some computer code”. At the same time I’ve been playing with DiffusionBee – a free Apple silicon version of…

  • Color Picker (website)

    I’ve started work on trying to recreate a UI provided by a designer, and in the process needed to identify some colours from a PNG image. I found this great website for this exact purpose. The site is ImageColorPicker. To use it, you “upload” your image (actually the image is not going anywhere – it’s…

  • Design Help

    I think I mentioned when I’d completed the TimesTable app, that I was not happy with the design. It’s ugly, I don’t like the way the feedback about a wrong answer is shown at the same time as the next question, the number of questions setting would be rarely changed and looks uncomfortable where it…

  • Calculator

    The app I’m working on currently (for multiplication tables practice) has a number type keypad and display a bit like a calculator – but for entering the answers. It’s been quite fun to think through all the little problems to make it work how you’d expect, so I was quite interested to watch an iOS…

  • Gitting up to date

    I’ve started the habit of branching my code for each feature or batches of features. This is not really needed, I’ve developing solo, and the code on main is not in production. I could just go on committing, but part of my process is about becoming competent with git. There are a couple of git…

  • iOS Academy

    A YouTube channel worth subscribing to is Afraz Siddiqui’s iOS Academy. He does a great videos on iOS development. My favouriets might be the shorter focussed ones, like this one on the new SwiftUI chart views.

  • Animation Feedback

    I had a look at Paul’s version of the challenge to animate the Guess The Flags app, and like me he’d hit on altering the amount of each animation depending on if it was the clicked on flag, but he’d done it with a lot less code – using the ternary operator in each of…

  • Gists for embedding code

    So, I might have found a slightly better method for sharing code in posts that I complained about the other day. GitHub has a thing called Gists. It’s like a tiny repository you can paste a code snippet into (or upload a source file). Once that’s done, you can just paste the URL of the…

  • WordPress Code Blocks

    Non-iOS post warning :- ) I’m not really happy with the way I’m sharing code in these posts. I started off with the regular WordPress code blocks: These seem a bit large to me, but it comes with a font size choice, which I like setting to “Tiny”: There’s a reason why coloured syntax highlighting…

  • How to upgrade XCode and Swift

    With the September release of XCode 14 and Swift 5.7 it was time for my first update – I looked in “About” for an update link but there wasn’t one – so if you’re as dense as me, the tip is to head to the Mac App Store and have a look at the Updates…