Think And Build

Think And Build

Think And Build is a blog about mobile and videogame development, mainly focused on iOS and Unreal Engine.

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iOS

iOS functional testing with user stories, UI Test and local server

Posted on October 26th, 2015.

In my projects I’ve been mostly focused on Unit Testing but I was always interested in performing some tests on the navigation flow of the application, being then able to verify something like this: “When a user inserts valid credentials and taps the Sign In button, then he moves to the next view”. I know that at a first sight it might...

iOS

Introduction to UIStackView

Posted on August 5th, 2015.

When it comes to work with Auto Layout to build a complex user interface, it happens that you end up creating a huge number of constraints. Some of those constraints are needed for the main structure, some other are needed just to keep some secondary elements aligned. That said, even if you are skilled enough with Auto Layout, updating...

iOS

X-Ray of a real Application

Posted on June 30th, 2015.

Yesterday I released Prio, my very first self-produced iOS application! It’s essentially a to-do, done-list and reminder app (yeah, something new, uh!?) with an extremely customized user interface. So, since I had the chance to experiment a lot with custom UI, graphics and structure, I thought it’d be interesting to write an...

iOS

Implementing the Periscope App Pull-to-refresh control

Posted on May 10th, 2015.

In this tutorial I’m going to implement the “Pull To Refresh” control created for the iPhone app Periscope. It’s something new that caught my attention, so I thought I’d “disassemble” their layout trying to create something similar. Even if I’m not sure if they are using a standard NavigationBar, I’d like to implement...

iOS

Writing a Sketch Plugin to easily generate iOS Assets

Posted on March 3rd, 2015.

Before we begin with the code, I wanted to point out that in just a couple of months I have completely replaced Photoshop with Bohemian Coding’s Sketch. This software has clearly been developed with user interface workflows in mind and it’s exactly what I need to design my UIs. Furthermore, we can easily create plugins that...

iOS

How to build a custom (and “designable”) control in Swift

Posted on November 18th, 2014.

Around two years ago I wrote a tutorial to show how to build custom controls in iOS. That tutorial was really appreciated by the dev community, so I’ve decided to update it to Swift and to add the designable/inspectable properties support to design the control directly through Interface Builder. Before letting you dive into the...

iOS

Interactive Notifications with Notification Actions

Posted on October 6th, 2014.

iOS 8 comes with a long list of interesting improvements and in this article I want to show you one of those: Notification Actions. With this new feature users can directly interact with push or local notifications without opening the application. A simple example? A todo app presents a reminder of a task to the user through a local...

iOS

Building custom UI Elements with IBDesignable

Posted on September 8th, 2014.

If you have read some of my previous articles you’ve probably noticed that I love UI customization! It’s an excellent chance to let your App stand out from the crowd thanks to its unique looks and innovative interactions. It looks like Apple really wants us to unleash our creativity and they are proving it with a couple of useful...

iOS

From Objective-C to Swift: thoughts and hints

Posted on July 9th, 2014.

In this article I want to share with you some of the thoughts I had along the way during my transition from Objective-C to Swift. I’ll try to give you hints and I’ll discuss the main pitfalls, trying to compare, when possible, the different approaches of these two languages. So without further ado let’s dive into the...

iOS

Learn to love Auto Layout… programmatically

Posted on May 13th, 2014.

The last months were quite intense. Nicola and I, have released an iOS App for a client that right now is heavily featured in the Italian App Store, I’m planning a trip to Japan (actually, my girlfriend is…) and I’ve started a new personal iOS project. Nonetheless, I’m ready to continue on our journey with Auto...