iOS - Stephen Radford

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 of YouTube a day (don't @ me). Though YouTube obviously thought of Red as much more than just a way to

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 see emoji sent from iOS 11 or macOS 10.13 on Sierra but there's an easy fix. Emoji is just

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 easy install of IPAs on devices

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 in my life is to consume video through YouTube, Netflix, and Put.io and for that it mostly works fine

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 when viewing websites in portrait but by default does cause some issues in landscape. To accommodate the notch iOS 11

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 pretty satisfied with the lights in my house now but there's plenty more I would still love to be able

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 slips of green paper popped in a box or handed to your pharmacist and then a 24-48 hour waiting period

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 lights away and make the perfect mood lighting. Philips Hue already offer LED strips with LIFX's "Z" strip

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 higher. One thing that always put me off about the Hue system is the price. To buy into the system

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 that are often used for illegal

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. With the release of the Apple TV, porting the app was a no brainer and with it came additional features

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 iOS. However, Apple also opened up their TVML and TVJS platform that has been used on Apple TV 2 and

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. Currently it's only available on iOS which, while great means that I can't really check it while I'm in work.

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 and am pleased to say Fetch is now free for both iOS and tvOS. If you've not used Fetch before,

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 for the new Apple TV. From iOS → tvOS Fetch was a pre-existing app for both iPhone and iPad so moving

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 rather than on the website but was finding it impossible. By default, the iOS app adds a URL scheme to

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 those annoying EU cookie banners. Building a content blocker is both easy and hard at the same time. Wait what?

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 order to authenticate. Before I even

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 the edit functionality to achieve this.

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 an associative array (think: dictionary) of

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 it looks like: discoveryManager?.registerDeviceService(deviceClass:

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 a variety of methods of which

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 — here's how. From Storyboard Open up

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 get around to customising the thing. 1. Alcatraz - Xcode's missing package manager Every decent text editor I've used (read:

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 the concept from day one. You cover the proximity sensor on the iPhone and it'll start recording 4 seconds of