Captain Danko’s JavaScript Lab — Code Smarter with Tutorials, Frameworks & Dev Insights

Upto this point, I had only worked with the UIWebView in iOS, even though I had heard/read about the new WKWebView . I had only read good things about it but given the limited resources at my startup, working with WKWebView was a lower priority. A few weeks ago, the time was right for me to have a more in-depth look at the WKWebView and while learning more about it I realised something. I realised that while there are a ton of useful tutorials out there, almost none of them covered it with the depth or all the use cases that I was after. One example of missing information or a use case is, if we receive a json object from the webview, how do we parse it in Swift? In this post I will be talking about how to parse json data in Swift sent from web content hosted in a WKWebView of an iOS app. Background As seen from HTMLStarterAppWithSwift , my interest in the webview is not for showing content hosted in a website but more towards working with content hosted locally i.e. a nati...

This is one of those achievements that had me yell a big "YAYYYYY" when I had it working, even though it is not complete at this stage. After coming across some hurdles, I finally managed to deploy a web demo for my iOS app  My Day To-Do  that anyone with a mobile or PC can try. In this short post, I will talk about my motivation for it as well as shed some light on my overall solution and I will conclude this post with my thoughts on this approach and what I think about it, in current day and age.  Motivation  My Day To-Dos has both a free and a paid version and the distinguishing features between the two are (at this stage) weather summary selecting the language the app talks in The above features are only available in the paid version and I wanted to give any prospective users a feel for what these features are like. Solution I have already written about the unique way in which I built my native iOS app i.e. Html5 for UI and native...

At some point the thought of adding a Widget to my iOS app came to mind which was followed by starting work on adding a widget for my app, My Day Todos . Obviously the first step was to learn how to add a Widget to an iOS app and in that learning process I discovered many things about widgets in iOS first of which was a widget in iOS is a an app extension i.e a  Today Extension . While I am still haven't finished working on the widget for my iOS app, I thought I would take some time out and share what I have learned. In this post, I will share a few important tips and provide an example of how to add a Widget to an iOS app and have the widget UI powered by Html5 via  Ionic framework . I added some code to my Github repo, Html5StarterAppWithSwift in order to show how this can be achieved. There are already too many tutorials out on the Web on how to add a Today extension to an iOS app so I won't be including that here. Instead I will focus on sharing some of the useful tip...

I started making iOS apps soon after Xcode 6 beta was released, one of the main attractions for me was the new programming language, Swift . I really enjoyed coding in Swift but making an iOS app is more than just about coding in Swift, there's a whole bunch of additional stuff that you need to know. In this blog post, I am just going to share a list of online resources that helped me learn how to make iOS apps and eventually get to creating my first iOS app My Day Todo s. Ok, I will try to get through the resources that I found in Chronological order, In the beginning... Swift was new and Xcode 6 was still in beta, so there weren't a whole lot of useful resources out there, some of my SO questions were down-voted and closed. In fact for one of my questions someone on SO who possibly down-voted my question commented that, "this is not a real question, it is so simple to do this in Objective-C"... I am pretty sure my question was very clear about me working with ...

This is something that I had been meaning to add to  Html5StarterAppWithSwift for a long time and I was finally able to achieve that a couple of weeks ago. Background One of my past jobs involved me working on a web app that did all sorts of data visualisation i.e. drawing charts using Javascript charting libraries. Consequently, I have also applied my data visualisation knowledge to one of my personal projects i.e.  PTAapp  which should give an indication of how data visualisation fits into my background. Now let's talk about some of the tech that I used to build charts. In my past job we used Google Charts  to draw charts, which at the time at least required an internet connection to work. As I talk about in my previous post  I used morris.js  to avoid the issue of internet connectivity. Now that I am involved in making iOS apps and given my background it seemed natural for me to apply my charting knowledge to making iOS apps...and that is ...

This is a very short blog post to describe my latest commit to this template. The Xcode project template in question here is my open-source repo on Github, titled  Html5StarterAppWithSwift . This repo came to be while I was working on my iOS app, My Day Todos and if you need to know what that repo is, then have a look at this README file or this blog post .  The latest update to the repo: Swift 2 When Xcode 7 was released, so was Swift 2 and since this repo was built using Xcode 6 and Swift 1, I had to migrate it so people do not have any issues when working with this on Xcode 7. I think there may still be people working with Xcode 6 for at least another few months and hence, my original Xcode 6 compliant code is still there. I have added another branch to this repo called, SwiftOne which has the Xcode 6 and Swift 1 code. Upcoming features: Charting and what else? Very soon, I will be demonstrating how to use an Html5 based charting solution in a native iOS app via...

So I have written a few posts about my Html5StarterAppWithSwift  and one of my objectives with that project/Github repo is to ensure more people know about it. So if anyone is trying to build a "native" HTML5 iOS app in a way similar to what is mentioned here , they are not slowed down by having to solve the same problems that I faced. How does thechangelog.com fit into the whole picture? I listen to thechangelog.com podcast often i.e. every time they have a new podcast on something that interests me (which is 80-85% of the time). I have been listening to their podcasts for a few years now and I know they like and support open-source stuff. So I decided to let them know about Html5StarterAppWithSwift by "Ping"  ...ing them i.e. create an issue in their Github repo , to let them know about Html5StarterAppWithSwift and then it got featured in thechangelog.com weekly. So I am hoping more people know about it and can make use of it, while working on their iOS app...