A Passionate Technologists' Journal

Adding it lately, but still feel like doing it. Here's the rough overview/summary of what has been added into iOS9: An All New App Switcher (From left to right. Placed like a deck of cards). Contact guesses from Mail in Call Screen. Bottom scroll to navigate quickly through Photos. Contact thumbnails in Messages. Notifications view by Recent. New screen for Spotlight with Siri Suggestions and Contacts search. Plugging in the earbuds would bring up the Music controls on the Lock screen. Accessing the iCloud Drive app. Low Power Mode. Automatically organise Selfies, Screenshots in Photos app. New San Francisco Font. Shift Key (To differentiate b/w Caps/Lower cases). Back button on status bar to go back to the previous app. Notes (Sheet/popup) option from Share sheet. Search in Settings. Public transit in maps. Hands off. 6-Digits Passcode. 1.3GB OS (As oppose to 4.58GB iOS8.0) Xcode7 allows to install app on device w/o paying/subscribing for Apple’s Dev...

Recently, I got a chance to work on a project, where we needed to provide an ability to users of an iOS app to draw on Maps. Basically, we decided to go with Google Maps, because of its overall coverage and its popularity. Hence, we used  Google Maps SDK for iOS  and we wanted to implement "Free Hand Drawing on the Google Maps". To do so, I started searching around the internet for some good resources, but weren't able to find any good one that could just be used like Plug and Play. We had to do a lot of handling on our own and hence decided to write a blog post and a sample project just to make it useful for others, so that others in the same path don't struggle much like me. If you are only planning to draw a Polygon on the Map (As most of them do), then may be you don't have to read the entire post. Instead just follow these steps: (i) Copy & Paste these Folders into your project: "SARMapDrawView", "Categories" & "Models...

In SWIFT, an interesting and a powerful feature that i liked mostly is "Optionals" . Can you imagine, how many times you have checked a variable in Objective-C for its Validness, (If it is nil or not) ? How many times do you think, you might have written the below code in Objective-C: NSString *string = someFun() if (string != nil){ //do some stuff with the returned string here } I can’t even count on this, since i do this often throughout my classes. Apple have done a great job to solve this issue with Optional variables. Let’s look into this feature more deeper with an example to understand its use and purpose. Consider, you have an array of strings of Phone Numbers as below: let numbers = [“9876543219”, “9898878890”, “9876556789”] We’ll write a simple function to see if we can find a phone number within the array.     func findNumber (number: String , numbers: [ String ]) -> String {     ...

Should have posted this a long back, but just got the perfect time to get it done.  I got a chance to develop an e-Commerce mobile application targeted at iOS8. We decided to develop it using the latest technologies, so we chose to use the SWIFT language released by Apple in Conjunction with iOS8. SWIFT is a safe, modern and powerful Language, it has a lot of interesting, time saving features, which could allow us(Developers) to focus/work more on the Application’s logic rather than the coding itself. Swift’s shorthand syntax makes us to write less code when compared to Objective C. It was a great decision to remove the semicolons(At the end of each statement), Braces (In Control Flows), Subscripts, Enumerations, etc… Some of the very interesting stuff includes: Optionals Tuples Closures Access Control Going briefly into those interesting stuff, that mostly adds value to our code/time. Optionals: The most interesting and powerful f...