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UIKit Apprentice

Third Edition · iOS 18 · Swift 5.10 · Xcode 16

Before You Begin

Section 0: 5 chapters
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Getting Started

Section 1: 8 chapters
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Checklists

Section 2: 12 chapters
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My Locations

Section 3: 11 chapters
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Store Search

Section 4: 13 chapters
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26. Adding Polish
Written by Fahim Farook

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Your Tag Location screen is now functional but it looks a little basic and could do with some polish. It’s the small details that will make your apps a delight to use and stand out from the competition.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

  • Improve the user experience: How to improve the user experience by adding tiny tweaks to your app which gives it some polish.
  • Add a HUD: How to add a HUD (Heads Up Display) to your app to provide a quick, animated status update.
  • Handle the navigation: How to continue the navigation flow after displaying the HUD.

Improve the user experience

Take a look at the design of the cell with the Description text view:

There is a margin between the text view and the cell border
There is a margin between the text view and the cell border

There is a margin between the text view and the cell border, but because the background of both the cell and the text view are white, the user cannot see where the text view begins or ends.

It is possible to tap on the cell but be just outside the text view area. That is annoying when you want to start typing: you think that you’re tapping in the text view, but the keyboard doesn’t appear.

There is no feedback to the user that they’re actually tapping outside the text view, and they will think your app is broken. In my opinion, deservedly so.

Keyboard activation for cells

You’ll have to make the app a little more forgiving. When the user taps anywhere inside that first cell, the text view should activate, even if the tap wasn’t on the text view itself.

Deactivate the keyboard

It would be nice if the keyboard disappeared after you tapped anywhere else on the screen. As it happens, that is not so hard to implement.

The HUD

There is one more improvement I wish to make to this screen, just to add a little spice. When you tap the Done button to close the screen, the app will show a quick animation to let you know it successfully saved the location:

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Create the HUD view

➤ Add a new file to the project using the New Empty File option and name it HudView.

Use the HUD view

Let’s add the code to call this funky new HUD, so that you can see it in action.

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Draw the HUD view

➤ Remove the backgroundColor line from the hud(inView:animated:) method.

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Display the HUD checkmark

➤ The Resources folder for the book has two files in the Hud Images folder, Checkmark@2x.png and Checkmark@3x.png. Add these files to the asset catalog, Assets.xcassets.

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Failable initializers

To create the UIImage you used if let to unwrap the resulting object. That’s because UIImage(named:) is a failable initializer.

Display the HUD text

Usually, to display text in your own view, you’d add a UILabel object as a subview and let UILabel do all the hard work. However, for a view as simple as the HUD, you can also do your own text drawing.

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Add some animation

OK, you’ve now got a rounded box with a checkmark, but it’s still far from spectacular. Time to liven it up a little with some animation!

Improve the animation

You can actually do one better. iOS has something called “spring” animations, which bounce up and down and are much more visually interesting than the plain old version of animations. Using them is very simple.

Handle the navigation

Back to LocationDetailsViewController… You still need to close the screen when the user taps Done.

Clean up the code

I don’t know about you, but I find this GCD stuff to be a bit messy. So let’s clean up the code and make it easier to understand.

25. The Tag Location Screen
27. Saving Locations
Have a technical question? Want to report a bug? You can ask questions and report bugs to the book authors in our official book forum here.
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