iOS

Review

YouTube Music: A Real Spotify Competitor?

When YouTube Red launched in the US in 2015 I was extremely jealous. The promise of ad-free YouTube was one I'd dreamed of. Unsurprising considering I probably watch 2-3+ hours

Tutorial

Install High Sierra Emoji on Older Versions

I'm being extremely stubborn and refusing to update to High Sierra at the moment for good reason. The only thing that's really been annoying me is the fact I can't

Tutorial

Installing Fetch with Cydia Impactor

Fetch has been open source since it was removed by Apple from the App Store but the overhead of installing has always been large since it required not only a Mac but also knowledge of Xcode. I recently discovered Cydia Impactor which allows for

Tutorial

Downgrading iOS 9.3.5 to iOS 6

Contents Introduction Jailbreak with Phoenix OpenSSH Downgrade to iOS 6 Introduction I may be one of the only people left still rocking an iPad 2. The only purpose it has

iPhone

Removing the White Bars in Safari on iPhone X

The new iPhone X features a beautiful edge-to-edge display. Well, almost. There is the small issue of a notch at the top of the browser which doesn't cause an issue

HomeKit

HomeKit IR Blaster: Controlling My TV with HomeKit

If you've read any of my previous posts then you probably already realise I'm on a mission to automate my entire house and control it using Apple's HomeKit protocol. I'm

Personal

Echo: Revolutionising NHS Prescriptions

Like millions in the UK I rely on repeat prescriptions to keep me healthy. The NHS is marvellous but the repeat prescription service has always felt a little archaic. Little

HomeKit

Cheap HomeKit LED Strips

After my success with Homebridge and LIFX I wanted to get some more HomeKit compatible lights for my house. LED strips provide an easy way to hide versatile and flexible

Projects

HomeKit ❤️ LIFX

Every three months or so I found myself looking at Philips Hue and since iOS 10 came around with its deep HomeKit integration the desire for home automation has be

Projects

What's going on with Fetch?

Last Wednesday evening we received a notification from Apple that Fetch had been removed from the App Store. They cited the following rule and sent some screenshots accompanying the notice of the transfers screen. 22.4 Your app falls into a category of apps

iOS

Fetch 2

Last year I started working on my first iOS app as a way to learn Swift. What I built turned out to be a fairly popular client for Put.io.

tvOS

Mixing TVML and UIKit without a server

When building for tvOS Apple gave us two approaches. A fully native app could be built using UIKit, storyboards and everything developers have been familiar with when building apps for

Programming

Peach.cool — API, PeachKit & Peach for Mac

So Peach stumbled onto the scene Friday. If you haven't heard of it, it's this cool new social network that lets you post cool stuff using "magic" words.

iOS

Setting Fetch Free

Fetch was the first iOS project I ever made and has been the most successful both on iPhone and on Apple TV. Today, I'm dropping the £2.99 price tag

Apps

Fetch for  tv

Since building Fetch, the thing I wanted most was improved AirPlay support. Apple did even better than that though an enabled developers to natively build apps using TVML or UIKit

JavaScript

Deeplinking (how to force out of Facebook's in-app browser and fallback on desktop)

So it turns out these in-app web views can't die quick enough (hello, SafariViewController!). Marty tweeted he was trying to get YouTube videos to open in the native iOS app

Swift

Content blockers are easy. Content blockers are hard.

So today, Mr. Crumble — Cocoon's latest app — is out. It's a content blocker for iOS 9 but unlike other content blockers it's not bothered about ads but instead it targets

tvOS

OAuth Authentication on tvOS

I've seen a few people comment on how OAuth is impossible on the new Apple TV due to the lack of any form of web view. In building Fetch for the Apple TV we needed to interact with an OAuth provider (Put.io) in

Swift

Make UILabel Copyable in Swift

I've been working on an iOS app that called for some text to be copyable but not editable. I wanted to able to long-press and have the contextual menu show the "Copy" action. I'd initially thought about using a UITextField and disabling

Swift

Easy Form Validation in Swift

I come from a very web-centric background and have used frameworks like Laravel in the past extensively. One of the things I really loved about that framework in particular was the way in which it handled validation. If you don't know, Laravel just takes

Swift

Swift "AnyClass" Type

TL;DR you're looking for MyClass.self When working with ConnectSDK, I came across something I hadn't before in Swift: the AnyClass type. ConnectSDK is an Objective-C based library so I'd imagine this is a rarity when working with native Swift code. Here's what

Swift

Creating a Delegate in Swift

The Delegate pattern is one that's widely used is developing apps for iOS and OS X and it's one that's very simple to implement in Swift. It's primarily used to alert classes of changes or interactions in other instances. For example, UITableView's delegate has

Quick Tip

Quick Tip: Globally Changing iOS Tint Colour In Swift

One of the ways an app can be customised easily in iOS is to change its tint colour. This can be done for specific elements such as your navigation bar in your storyboard. However, this can also be changed globally for your entire application

Development

Customising Xcode

I've been using Xcode more and more lately after picking up a couple of iOS and OS X apps. For some reason though, it took me until yesterday to finally

Development

Replicating Beme's Proximity-Record in Swift

If you haven't seen Beme yet, you've probably been living under a rock. It's Casey Neistat's new video creation application that uses doesn't show you what you're recording. I've loved