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

Game Development with Unity: Lessons learned while building Linia

Posted on October 25th, 2016.

The past few months have been intense. Among the many things that happened and kept me away from writing, I got married and released the first game I ever worked on, Linia. Even though I’m super happy about both, I’ll talk about Linia here and about how, by harnessing the power of Unity, we were able to build custom tools to...

iOS

Creating custom walkthroughs for your apps

Posted on March 12th, 2016.

One year ago I’ve released BWWalkthrough, a library that simplifies the creation of walkthroughs without any constraints on user interfaces design. The library became quite popular on GitHub, so I’ve decided to write this tutorial to help you guys set up and use it with ease. Here is a sneak peek of the final result of this tutorial (or...

iOS

Apple Watch development overview

Posted on February 22nd, 2016.

I badly wanted to write a generic article about Apple Watch development because I really needed to resume what I’ve learned so far. That being said, in this article you’ll read an overview that might be really useful if you are starting with Apple Watch development. The article introduces the main WatchKit concepts and provides links to...

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...