Working UIButton animations in Swift - ios

Question

I've been trying to get this snippit of code to work but I can't seem to get my UIButton to animate through images.
#IBOutlet weak var screenButton: UIButton!;
func animation(){
var animationButton : UIButton!;
var imageList = [UIImage]();
var image1:UIImage = UIImage(named:"3fingers-o-l-animation1.png")!;
var image2:UIImage = UIImage(named:"4fingers-o-l-animation1.png")!;
animationButtonscreenButton = screenButton;
imageList = [image1, image2];
animationButton!.imageView!.animationImages = imageList;
animationButton!.imageView!.animationDuration = 1.0;
animationButton!.imageView!.startAnimating();
}
After writing this code I've dragged a line from screenButton to the button I want to animate through the image in the Storyboard.
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

What you need to do is to not re-initialize the UIButton in the function animation; so, comment out this line:
//var animationButton : UIButton!
Besides just having an IBOutlet, we need also an IBAction to your function animation. Do the same thing as you do for your button by control dragging a "line" to the block of function (check IBAction, not IBOutlet).
A little walk-through while you are still in storyboard:
What you have is only one button named: animationButton, which is an IBOutlet from your storyboard to your code by control-dragging a "line".
For your animation function:
Control-drag also from storyboard from the button a "line" to the block of the animation function.
Set up an initial image for you button in storyboard as will be mentioned shortly below.
In addition, we need to set up an initial image in storyboard; otherwise, the image property of the button is nil.
Please do so in storyboard by clicking on the right hand side "Attributes Inspector" and then set an image where it says "image". As test, I set that up as "1.jpg".
Thus, you code should look like the following:
#IBOutlet weak var animationButton: UIButton!
#IBAction func animation()
{
print("button touched")
//var animationButton : UIButton!
var imageList = [UIImage]()
var image1:UIImage = UIImage(named:"1.jpg")!
var image2:UIImage = UIImage(named:"2.jpg")!
//animationButtonscreenButton = screenButton;
imageList = [image1, image2];
animationButton!.imageView!.animationImages = imageList
animationButton!.imageView!.animationDuration = 1.0
animationButton!.imageView!.startAnimating()
}
Just ran a quick test; it gets touch event and the images animate on the button. Hope this helps.