Yesterday we released Goalee, an app that helps you not lose sight of your life’s goals. The main idea behind the app is that all the annoyances, conflicts or so-called problems we face in our everyday lives pale in comparison with our true goals in life.

The issue I faced, as many others, is that I tend to lose track of what I desire most, exactly because of problems here and there. One approach is to start writing down your goals on a sheet of paper, which I did and it worked; for a while, because I eventually started overlooking said sheet of paper.

I then tried using to-do apps, or habit t […]

Entering text in multiple text fields is such a common pattern — everywhere, not just iOS — there should be a way to easily navigate from on field to the next, preferably the ”correct” one. Sadly, iOS doesn’t offer this feature, but let’s see how we could accomplish this ourselves.

First, a quick recap on what we need:

• See the Next button if there are any fields after the current one; preferably just ones that are still empty.
• Tapping the Next button takes us to the correct field.
• See the Return button if there are no more fields after the current one; preferably taking empty ones into consid

The other day, Soroush wrote a great post about hitTest(_:with:) (you should check it out), which reminded me of a problem I solved the other week: I wanted to increase a UIButton’s tap area, without increasing the button’s frame.

The following code would go in one of the button’s superviews; for example, you might have a mainContainer, which has a UIStackView that contains the button — we’d implement it in mainContainer:

override func hitTest(_ point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> UIView? {
	let biggerButtonFrame = theButton.frame.insetBy(dx: -30, dy: -30) // 1
		
	if biggerButtonFrame.con […]

In this post I’d like to explain how to let the user pick a photo and automatically extract the location for them. The post is targeted at iOS 11+, because starting with this version, to use an UIImagePickerController we don’t need to ask the user’s permission to access their photo library, because the controller runs as a separate process from the app, which means the app gets read-only access only to the image the user selected, and just to the image — no metadata included.

For this, we will need the UIImagePickerController:

func pickPhotoFromLibrary() {
	// 1
	guard UIImagePickerController.isSou […]

I’ve recently gave Micro.blog a try and  shortly after  I thought of importing all my tweets here, because … why not own my content? This post will be about extracting and converting your Twitter archive into simpler objects with just text and timestamp — there are many more available fields, but these were the only ones I was particularly interested in.

First things first, we need to request your archive: in our Twitter’s profile settings, all the way to the bottom we can find ”Your Tweet archive”; we need to click on ”Request your archive” and after a while we’ll receive an email with a link […]

UIKit does this really nice thing, where the user can tap around a text knob — with quite some margin, too — and still intercept the touch; but it appears that all knobs are created equal, but some are more equal than others; and so our story begins…

On one of our projects, the view for creating a challenge is full of UITextViews — almost all of them can have two rows or more, so we couldn’t use UITextFields. The default textContainerInsets were too big — at least vertically — so they were set to 0, at which point a problem arose: the knobs were cut off; and not only that, they weren’t interce […]

A few months ago I was writing about a new beginning and I mentioned a couple of projects. I mentioned first one in a previous post and now I'm writing about the second.

The main goal of the app is for users to save their fidelity cards digitally (or request new ones), combined with the conveniences of displaying merchants & their offers, and having a shopping list at hand. There's also a friends feature, with which users can share their shopping lists — shopping together, faster and smarter has never been easier!

It's targeted at the local, Romanian, market, but it should be possible to adapt […]

2 years and a half ago, I was writing about how I recently started using Tower — didn't even realize it's been so long. In that post I was explaining how I solved the fact that it doesn't support opening Pull Requests. Well ... The latest version of Tower now supports it, and I gotta say they're as seamless as one would expect!

A few new features:

• To complement Quick Open, Quick Actions shortcut makes performing actions so much easier (checkout, push, merge, etc).
• An interactive rebase that lets you perform any actions on commits — like rename, reorder or delete — right from the branch view.

The usual solution to observe and broadcast is to use NotificationCenter:

final class Post { // 1

  	var title: String
	var body: String

	init(title: String, body: String) {
		self.title = title
		self.body = body
	}

}

extension NSNotification.Name { // 2

	static let LTHPostReceived = NSNotification.Name(rawValue: "com.rolandleth.com.postReceivedNotification")

}

final class PostCreationController: UIViewController { // 3

	private let post: Post

	// [...]

	private func savePost() { // 4
		// [...]

		let userInfo = ["post": post] // 5
		let notification = Notification(name: .LTHPostReceiv […]

A few months ago I was writing about a new beginning and I mentioned a couple of projects. I would like to present one of them today. It took longer than expected, but we launched today and we're really happy about the results. I'll start with a really short intro:

Our lives are filled with habits; some are good, some are bad. Everyone wants to get rid of their bad habits, and we all want to increase the number and/or frequency of good habits; we all want to eat healthier, do more sport, be more productive, or procrastinate less.

On the other hand, we humans are, by nature, a really sociable s […]