While I am quite new to the Apple developing stuff, coming from a long front-end dev career, I'm wondering if there's any better option than just using a function like refreshUI when I receive data from server.
I'm used to stuff like RactiveJS, Angular ( stuff based on handlebars which updates automatically in the interface when giving it a new value )
Any ideas or knowledge about that ?
I could be stupid or maybe I don't know what to exactly search for on google.
Yes you are in luck!
By far the most common and well supported library for this in iOS is Reactive Cocoa:
https://github.com/ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveCocoa
The learning curve may be a bit steep but its well worth it in my opinion.
Since you're using Swift, SwiftBond is where it's at
https://github.com/SwiftBond/Bond
Alternatives to explore:
Reactive Cocoa
RxSwift
DIY via a combination of
-- Key value observing
-- UINotificationCenter
-- MVVM design patterns
-- Closures
Don't take the above as exhausting, I am in the process of figuring out myself the best course of action.
Related
I want to use C++ library which makes it easy to build high-performance audio apps
https://github.com/google/oboe
Google Oboe seems for Android
can i somehow use it for iOS also ? or any similar alternative for iOS ?
I don't want to use Superpowered because of their licence terms!
There are no plans to release an iOS version of Oboe at present. You could look at FMOD or JUCE.
If I remember correctly (from videos of demos at events), The development of this library came from people heavily involved with the Google Android infrastructure, and thus the Oboe library is highly customized to tackle the low-latency short-comings of Android.
This being said, Google would not have the resources to tackle such an intensive and complicated problem for a completely different platform. As well (unfortunately) that wouldn't be in their best interest competitively-speaking.
I have heard of others using Superpowered, but I haven't gotten much info on it honestly, their marketing about it is all fluff, and there isn't any actual useful information, haha. I used Oboe myself, because I needed a dedicated native library.
As for iOS, I found a decent blog page that might be worth checking out: https://exceed7.com/native-audio/
This page suggests using OpenAL for objective-C/Swift. It looks like OpenAL is the similar implementation to OpenSL, which the Oboe library is partially based on. Unity seems to also utilize a library called FMOD (Not familiar with this one myself), as well DonTurner mentioned JUCE?.
So perhaps looking into these would be a good start, although I would assume using OpenAL might have some pretty involved developing, so ready your thinking cap!
Best of luck on your project!
Maybe you are looking for AudioKit
https://github.com/AudioKit/AudioKit
I am a novice iOS app developer. Basically i need to listen for any change in the UI (e.g., doing something on text change in textviewUI), and update UI to reflect any model change. I was looking into different technologies available for binding and am bit overwhelmed.
I know this is very subjective, but i would like to hear your suggestions on it (for swift and objective c both)
Also any pointers to the best practices would be really helpful.
Welcome to iOS! Cocoa (Touch for iOS)- Apple's framework- has some design patterns you will want to learn...
These include delegation and target/ action. Quickly summarized: delegation is handing some responsibilities off to an object that can take care of them. This provides methods you can use to get stuff (like changes) to that object. Read this link to learn more about delegates: https://useyourloaf.com/blog/quick-guide-to-swift-delegates/
Now, back to the text field example. A handy method in the UITextField delegate called textField(_:shouldChangeCharactersIn:replacementString:) will be called whenever the text field is going to change. As for target/ action, that's google-able. Is that a word? As for any pointers, learn MVC. Have fun!
I've created a core mechanic of my game and want to create a level editor for it. my game is not a tile-based one, so my needs are quite specific. Game is written using Swift and Cocos2d-swift, but i dont think i can figure something out with Sprite Builder.
What you can advice me? Can I for example create a level editor with c# and then use it from swift code?
And what data structure is the best?
I mean is it possible to serialize classes on desktop Swift application and then just load them on ios from file or I'll need to use json/xml?
It might be an old question but I ended up with using a .Net powered solution. I choosed as It has all controls that you need for creating a rich user interface and also, it has a lot of built-in and third party solutions for serializing levels in any way you want. And the c# syntax is very similar to the Swift one.
The only problem is that you might run windows to work with it.
My game in development also needed a non-tile level editor. A few months ago I took some time to make my choice.
Since my project still uses cocos2d 2.x, I don't use the whole new 3.x and SB system. After some investigation I found out that it would be too time consuming to adjust my whole project to the new system and adjusting SB to my needs, mainly because my game engine has been in development for quite some time and is close to finished. Further more, I couldn't find the right information to actually make it work for my game (it needed some odd level architecture I guess).
Finally, I didn't find any other good alternative so I decided to create my own level editor. In this way I had full control and I knew exactly how everything worked which was a huge advantage for me.
Right now my level editor has been finished for some time and works like a charm. I still think in my situation I made the right choice. Also because I learned a lot this way, building everything from the ground up. Having said that, for my next game I will probably go with the main stream and use SB from the start. Also for you I advice you to still check out SB and take some time for it before making an alternative choice...
I'll explain how I did mine. Disclaimer: it has some oddity's which only worked in my situation, but hopefully it helps a bit with choosing your own way to go, that's the goal I'm aiming at...
I used:
max/msp
Although it's developed to make music and audio based software, I used max/msp because it's very easy and fast for creating visual and interface based software as well.
More importend: I happened to be very experienced in it, which shortened the development time tremendously.
javascript
Inside the max/msp patch is a javascript file running. This file is like a bridge between the interface and the visual representation of the level being edited, and the database in which the level
is saved in. 70% of the editor development went into this file I think.
sqlite
All the data is written in a sqlite database. Again, this has been mainly the choice because it saved a great amount of development time in my case. I could have used xml files for instance, but my game was already using a sqlite database and because of this I felt comfortable using it, I had no experience in xml. Also all the code was already in place for a big part, which speeded up the whole proces a lot.
I'm very happy with the end result. It does everything I need, it's easy too use and since I made everything myself from the ground up I know exactly how every works.
Good luck with you choices.
This might be really generic and rather about the framework in general than a programming question. But, in the light of Swift, and the tedious and sometimes impossible tasks you have interacting with C APIs, that question is very relevant.
When building a new app for iOS, I discovered that you can really have a hard time working with address book framework. First, there is the uncomfortable pointer passing that you have to do for many CoreFoundation Methods. Secondly, the functions mostly return that ugly Unmanaged objects, where you have to figure out if they are retained or not (ARC is several years old now!). Accessing the properties through their identifiers is terribly cumbersome and far from typesafe. And lastly, since there is no C Function Pointer Support yet, you can´t even call ABAddressBookRegisterExternalChangeCallback(addressBook: ABAddressBook!, callback: ABExternalChangeCallback, context: UnsafeMutablePointer<Void>) because the ABExternalChangeCallback is so far only defined in Objective-C!
Then I found that there is some nice Objective-C Api in the Mac OS Version of AddressBookFramework. How unfair! Isn´t the iOS Frameworks younger? Why do you think Apple did this? And when will they change this in your opinion? Did I miss something, and is there an Objective-C Api for iOS, too?
Any suggestions for how to tackle above problems in the most convenient and beautiful way are welcome, too! For my part, I´m writing a complete wrapper to obscure all the nasty pointer- C-Function- and global constants uglyness. As soon as it´s ready I´ll commit it to StackExchange and maybe Github to let others benefit and discuss my solution.
EDIT: finally managed to upload my wrapper to GitHub. See
https://github.com/SocialbitGmbH/SwiftAddressBook
I agree with you about what iOS provides to access to the address book.
I've posted an answer explaining how I handled the problem, using some functional aspects of swift, and how I dealt with extracting unmanaged objects.
Briefly:
I defined a custom operator to allow me chaining function calls to transform some input data
I implemented 2 generic functions to extract unmanaged objects
posted some code to show how I access to the address book, loop through all contacts, and retrieve some data for each one
I am familiar with Matlab and would like to use what I know to add the functionality I am looking for in my iOS application. The title really says it all, I would like my app to be able to use the mathematics capabilities that matlab provides like integrals, derivatives, cross products, etc. not any graphing or any of that but just basic equation solving things. Is there a way to add this functionality to it while keeping my application agile. I have heard of the matlab coder that allow code to be switched from matlab to c or c++ that could be used for an Xcode project. If this is the best solution, is that a very difficult coder to work with? This is my first application, I have literally been working with Xcode and objective-c for a few weeks but I have the basic framework of my application good to go. I need this to add the real functionality to it and make it very useable. Please go easy on me if any of my questions seem obvious, I'm a nube, I really appreciate your answers.
Josh
As you mentioned, MATLAB Coder can generate C code from your MATLAB function. The header (.h) and source (.c) files can be plugged into your XCode project. The key part of the work is to decide what the input and output of the function should be and how to interface the rest of the XCode project with the Coder-generated function. Also, existing MATLAB code may not be completely compatible with the Coder, so that some modifications to your MATLAB code may be necessary. The Coder has interactive processes that guide you through this process.
If you haven't done so yet, you should start by looking at some examples of MATLAB Coder provided by MathWorks, e.g.,
http://www.mathworks.com/help/coder/examples/c-code-generation-for-a-matlab-kalman-filtering-algorithm.html?prodcode=ME&language=en