Is it possible to locate used code in xcode during testing? - ios

This may sound confusing, so I'll do my best to explain it. I am using Xcode and Swift.
I was wondering if it's possible to view which code is being used at specific times, e.g. when I press a button or use an action in a view.
I have some code and can test it in the simulator, but I don't know exactly what part of the ViewController files it is using. I'd like to know which methods/functions are being called when I do specific tasks.
IS there any way to do this without using a hundred print("Random Text") ?
Thanks!

Related

Why doesn't Xcode have a Event/Arguments when linking an object with an IBAction

I'm a complete newbie with Objective-C, Xcode, and the design itself. I have had a bit more experience developing iOS on Xcode, and when you wanted to link an action (i.e Slider changing value), you could select from many options unlike OS X.
How can I get around this with the same results, as using a pre-generated (control-drag slider to ViewController.h and .m) only fires an action at the mouseUp action.
EDIT #1: Sorry for making my question quite confusing. I am wondering how to receive actions while dragging.
Here's whats happening in picture form:
Most likely something very easy that I'm not getting at all.
I think you did not set controller from Storyboard. Please verify your controller class is properly set by following the image below
Your question is very confused. Are you trying to ask how to make a slider send its message while dragging, instead of just at the end?
On Mac, controls only have one target/action, there are no multiple actions. Objects have other properties that control when the actions are actually sent, if needed. In case of NSSlider, you probably forgot to set its 'continuous' property.

How to customize Apple CareKit?

In CareKit there are Care Card and Symptom tracker. I'm not understanding how to customize Carecardviewcontroller and symptomtrackerviewcontroller. I don't want to use these view controllers but interested in using components of these view controllers. there is no clear documentation to explore this.
(source: carekit.org)
If you are coming at this from a Swift perspective, then it has to be admitted that CareKit is about as "un-Swifty" as anything you can imagine. The GitHub site is certainly a start, but there is a horrific gap between reading the programming guides there and actually implementing a solution. It certainly has been a long slog for me!
That said, you can add customization to CareKit's story-board-free approach by using the view controller delegate functions that CareKit provides.
For example, suppose you have an app that reminds your user to perform two intervention activities, (1) take aspirin and (2) go for a brisk walk. If the user opens the Care Card and taps an event icon (one of the circles) for "take aspirin" then that will fire a method in the OCKCareCardViewControllerDelegate called:
careCardViewController(_ viewController: OCKCareCardViewController,
didSelectButtonWithInterventionEvent: OCKCarePlanEvent)
In this method you can segue to whatever view controller you'd like. E.g. if the event is for taking aspirin then display a view controller that shows a photo of an aspirin table, a reminder that it should contain just an 81 mg dose, and a recommendation about taking it with water.
Of course, nothing is ever easy with CareKit. It turns out that you will probably also want to turn off CareKit's standard practice of calling an event completed if the circle icon is tapped. That is accomplished by returning "false" from another delegate method called:
careCardViewController( _ viewController: OCKCareCardViewController,
shouldHandleEventCompletionFor
interventionActivity: OCKCarePlanActivity )
-> Bool
There is a book called Beginning CareKit Development that I can cautiously recommend. It was written for an earlier version of Swift and you have to do a lot of "translation" to get things to work with Swift 3. The last time I checked the GitHub repository for the code associated with the book was also entirely in this earlier version. APress will provide the code updated to Swift 3 if you ask. On the Kindle there are numerous little glitches with the book, including an index that has no page numbers nor hyperlinks to the associated text, very odd formatting choices that make the text sometimes hard to distinguish from code, and occasional errors in the solution code. All that said, I doubt that I'd have made any progress with CareKit without the book's help.
I've been looking for this answer myself.
As far as I researched, you can customize this screen visually with UIAppearance.
AND/OR you can create a new screen like this one from scratch using its behavior.
You can check the CareKit source code for hints on this: https://github.com/carekit-apple/CareKit/tree/master/CareKit/CareCard
There you'll notice some interesting classes/files:
OCKCareCardWeekView
OCKWeekLabelsView
OCKHeartView
OCKHeartButton
OCKWeekViewController
OCKHelpers
CareKit draws each screen via code. You can see how they do it by reading the code.
The idea is to create your own ViewController with these pieces, or one from scratch.
Surely it's not as trivial as just using CareCardViewController, but this will get you there.

iOS Layout - Whats the best solution?

For an iOS app i am currently working on, I need to manage the controls displayed on the screen based on the type of device the app is running on.
I will try to explain with a theoretical example (the actual numbers used below are not important, what interests me is best method to achieve the desired result).
Example:
In the case of the app in the screenshots, the button that overlaps the UIImageView should not be displayed at all OR displayed in another place on the screen.
So far I've worked with autolayout , but , from what i could figure, there's no way to say to xcode something like: hey, for a class size "Compact Width / Compact Height" , I want you to hide these buttons...but show them for "Regular Width / Compact Height" .
I also did some googling and saw some people talk about using different storyboards based on the device; I am also thinking, I could add/remove buttons dynamically based on the device type , but I think it's not so pleasant to have to add all of the constraints by hand (programatically that is).
So to resume, I would appreciate a suggestion of a 'best' way to do this , best meaning a combination of 'not so hard' + ' not so long'. Also, some code example (or links) would be highly appreciated.
Thank you all in advance !
I think it all depends how sophisticated it gets what you are doing overall. When you look at developer's code for large app projects very little is actually done in interface builder since the apps are so dynamic it's just too much work in IB.
Using multiple storyboards 'sounds' like a good idea, but often isn't. If you want to update/change one, in most cases you then have to change the other ones as well.
What I think is handy:
Use one storyboard (or multiple but for different parts of you app and not parallel ones) and then put in very 'special' cases multiple ViewControllers of the same class for the different size into the single storyboard. That way you won't forget about updating the second (and third) because they are all right there.
I would only use multiple 'parallel' storyboards for apps that support iPhone and iPad and it makes sense to really split them up..
Also:
I would as fas as possible still use just one representation and derive the other 'versions' from that in code. If you build a structured user interface you can then reuse (or just inherit) the code that 'hides' parts of the first viewController in the next. That way your code AND your IB files won't get cluttered.
Also think about internationalisation (if that is part of your future plans), since multiple IB documents and multiple instances of the same viewController layout really don't help for that ;)

How do I use a iOS custom keyboard extension as a programmable custom input view in Swift using storyboards or xibs

I want to design my own custom input view keyboard using a custom keyboard extension in swift. The existing Xcode 6.1 default set of keyboards do not fit my app needs. What I want is an enhanced number pad which I would modify, like in the Soulver app in the iOS app store. http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/iphone/
Ultimately I do not need a custom keyboard extension to offer to other apps but I do not mind if my app offers one. It looks to me like custom keyboards are the right place to start for for a custom input view keyboard.
I finally just about have digested constraints in the editor and would like to make use of a storyboard or xib.
I do need to be able to programmatically select the keyboard extension within the app.
The keyboard/custom view needs to be available to the app that contains it without activation in iOS settings.
Can this be done as an extension given the requirements, or can the custom keyboard extension be easily converted to a custom input view? Can you illustrate either one or point out sample Swift code I missed when searching? Thank you.
I am writing a keyboard extension in Swift right now and highly recommend not doing the same. Both Swift and the Keyboard Extension API are brand new, not well documented, creating significant learning curves, and both have significant bugs or weird implementation details to work around.
From the way you phrased your question it doesn't sound like you are very experienced in iOS development, and attempting to learn too many things at once is a recipe for disaster. If I could do my current project over, I would have done it in Objective C just to vastly simplify what I was learning.
But the good news is that you don't need the keyboard to run in other apps. This is good news because writing a custom input keyboard class within your own app is very simple and easy, and a great place to start. There is a good deal of existing documentation on how to do so, including this excellent post on stack overflow.
How do I retrieve keystrokes from a custom keyboard on an iOS app?
More detail:
The standard custom input view API in cocoa is very powerful, the one in the keyboard extension is almost entirely neutered, so you can do far more with a custom input view than you can with a keyboard Extension. To activate a keyboard extension requires getting the user to turn it on in their iPhone settings, there is no way around that and no way to pick which keyboard they choose within your app (other than to not allow custom keyboard extensions at all).
If you need to access the internet or data within your app for any reason (tracking usage information, activating an in-app purchase, accessing preferences) you must also convince your user to turn on "Full Access", which presents an incredibly scary alert that reads to users as if turning it on means you will be able to spy on them and steal their passwords
Getting back to why you don't want to use Swift in an extension. First, Objective C doesn't cause Xcode's code parser to crash many times a day, while developing in Swift does, sometimes crashing Xcode itself. In Objective C the debugger is almost always correct, in the current version of Swift often you can't see array or dictionary contents, sometimes what it shows is inaccurate, and when stepping through code often takes nonsensical routes. Developing in Objective Code means you won't have to update your code because of changes to Objective C itself, with Swift it's pretty much guaranteed they'll make significant syntax changes every major release (the last one in September did).
Developing a keyboard extension means sometimes your extension won't load for mysterious reasons, and you'll need to waste hours debugging why. My Swift keyboard extension is sometimes debugged solely with println() statements because I can't get the debugger to load. Since Apple's tools don't yet work well with Keyboard extensions, and also don't yet work well with Swift, using them together are multiplying your pain exponentially.
The end result is if you don't need to use this keyboard outside of your own application it's foolish to build it using the Keyboard extension API. If you do need to use the Keyboard extension API it's foolish to do it in Swift. This is written by a fool working full time trying to ship a Swift based keyboard extension.
If you want to use the standard cocoa custom input view API, then using Swift is probably fine. You will still have to deal with additional problems because it's such a young language, but you won't have lose so many days to mysterious, seemingly insoluble problems trying to figure out if they were caused by Swift, the Keyboard Extension API, failures in Xcode and it's debugger, or your own blunder.

iOS 5 Storyboard comments

Is there a way to add a comment on the iOS storyboards? Currently we have a project in which several people are working on the same interface and it would be very helpful to be able to write in the storyboard itself, so you can leave a note to others or to put stuff to remember later.
Something like a bubble with a message on it like "Mark, please fix the logout button, change it to red". Is there something like this? I can't found it.
Not that I have heard of. My suggestion is to use a View Controller that isn't connected to the other scenes and have a textview in there that you write on.
The other thing you can do in the implementation file is to use a
#warning Mark, please fix the logout button
directive
This would show up as a warning whenever the project is built or run.

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