Month: December 2013

New to iOS 7′s AVFoundation Framework is the speech synthesiser. It’s what Siri is using when he/she speaks to you. We can use this as well in our apps by passing a string into an AVSpeechUtterance object, which in turn we pass into an AVSpeechSynthesizer instance. Here’s how: – (IBAction)sayThis:(id)sender { AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer […]

New to iOS 7′s AVFoundation Framework is the speech synthesiser. It’s what Siri is using when he/she speaks to you. We can use this as well in our apps by passing a string into an AVSpeechUtterance object, which in turn we pass into an AVSpeechSynthesizer instance. Here’s how: – (IBAction)sayThis:(id)sender { AVSpeechSynthesizer *synthesizer = [[AVSpeechSynthesizer […]

Another option to share items in your app is to bring up a dialogue that contains several options, like the Photos app does: This is done with a UIActivityViewController and requires minimal work on our part. This controller is very clever and only brings up relevant services (you can’t print a video, or you can’t […]

It is extremely simple to bring up Facebook and Twitter Sheets in your app using the Social Framework. Once imported you can create a new instance of SLComposeViewController, initialise it with text, an image and a URL, and present it modally from your own view controller. You don’t have to specify anything other than which […]

Everything in your iOS app happens on “the main thread” by default. It’s like at the hairdresser’s – one thing after another. Since iOS 4 however you can execute things “asynchronously” by using Grand Central Dispatch. With it comes another phenomenon called Blocks. To make use of this feature you need to define your own […]

Say you had the URL to a file on the web and you’d like to save said file in the app’s Documents directory. I thought it would be as simple as using the NSFilemanager and copying the URL. But it’s a little more complex than that. Instead, we can use NSData to retrieve the data […]