DEV Community: Nathan Mattes

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 32.2

Nathan Mattes — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 21:29:03 +0000

Well, let's say, I needed a break for like a whole month. From time to time I had a bad conscience that I kind of stopped, but let's call it a break.

The last time I rushed through the animation-parts and that broke my neck when it came to the exercises. So today, a month later, I spontanously gave it another try, starting with Day 32 again.

It was about animations and I wanted to understand them. To do so I read the texts slowly: There're three ways to animate things:

Animate the view implicitly
Attach the animations to a binding and its change — and not the view!
Animate things explicitly

The third part was basically the previous Day 32-blogpost, it just blew my mind. What I didn't understand back than was the second way, but today I think I finally got it.

So, yeah, till tomorrow!

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 33

Nathan Mattes — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 09:54:39 +0000

Wow, another day with animations and transitions! Although I have to admit, that I'm not very talented — or used to, at least — when it comes to designing things — and animations especially — I really, really like to fiddle around with them. It's so much fun, just like playing around with gradients. Please admire my design-skills here.

So, today I learned how to create custom transitions — it's basically just another ViewModifier — and how to move things around. I'm really looking forward to using these animations in a real SwiftUI-project. I should come up with an idea at some point 😅

As always: Thank you very much for reading!

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 32

Nathan Mattes — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 20:46:05 +0000

Today's Day 32, time for another technique-project to learn new things: This time, it was about animations — and they were really fun!

A few weeks ago, I built some animations and transitions. And today it was pretty impressive to see how easily I can build a pulsing button in SwiftUI. I did the same thing with UIKit and CoreAnimation those few weeks ago.

What really blew my mind in the end was how easily I can build a coin-flip-like rotation animation 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Have a look at this!

And this is all the code it takes to flip the button three times in a second:

Button("Tap Me") {
  withAnimation(.easeInOut(duration: 1)) {
    self.animationAmount += 1080
  }
}
.padding(50)
.background(Color.red)
.foregroundColor(.white)
.clipShape(Circle())
.rotation3DEffect(.degrees(animationAmount), axis: (x: 0, y: 1, z: 0))

Wow, that's really awesome! I have to find out how to do this with UIKit 🤓

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 31

Nathan Mattes — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:10:47 +0000

Well, Day 31: It's review time again! I had to answer twelve questions — I scored 12 out of 12! — and solve three challenges to improve the game called WordScramble.

To be honest, I wasn't very creative when solving those questions, but that's fine with me today. Please have this picture of a cat as an excuse:

As always: Thanks for reading. What have you learned recently? Do you attend a daily course like me? I'm looking forward to hearing from you :-)

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 30

Nathan Mattes — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 20:10:24 +0000

Aaaaaand I'm done with Day 30. After having learned about UITextChecker and Lists yesterday, I put them to use today.

I also learned how to use onCommit with Textfield and onAppear, which seems to be viewDidAppear in UIKit-land. I'm still quite impressed, how easily I can build a UI and I like, how easily I can react when the user enters text in a Textfield, for example.

But trailing closures still confuse me, as I use AutoComplete in Xcode pretty heavily — I'm lazy — and every single time, I have to delete some code before adding the trailing closure. That annoys me. Can I turn this off, somehow?

Until tomorrow! 👋

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 29

Nathan Mattes — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 19:57:02 +0000

Another day, another small blogpost about my progress. I kind of get used to this daily blogging-thing and I really like it!

Day 29 was the first day of the fifth project, which will be another small game. I learned about List in SwiftUI and UITextChecker in UIKit.

According to Paul, this will be the last easy project. We'll see tomorrow, I guess!

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 28

Nathan Mattes — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 21:04:32 +0000

I missed yesterday, as life got in my way. But I didn't want to miss today, too, so I sat down before going to bed and just did Day 28: It was review time, again. I passed a small test and solved three challenges.

The last one was actually pretty tricky for me: I had to get rid of the button to start the bedtime-calcultion and show the calculated bedtime all the time instead.

My approach was to use a computed property for the bedtime, that gets calculated everytime the UI changes. This feels a bit unusual, but it works. With UIKit I would have used pickerView(_:didSelectRow:inComponent:), for example, but I didn't find such init-parameters for all the necessary UI-elements. While I can provide a stepper with closures to run onIncrement and onDecrement, for example, I didn't find anything similar for neither PickerView, nor DatePickerView. And so in the end, I used a computed property for bedTime.

How did you solve the three challenges for Day 28?

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 27

Nathan Mattes — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 09:45:35 +0000

Today I implemented the fourth project. It's a fun little app that helps you calculate when you should go to bed. It takes some parameters (when do you want to wake up? How many hours do you want to sleep? How many cups of coffee did you have?) into consideration and uses machine learning to calculate your bedtime. I really like those small projects Paul came up with for this course.

The app uses SwiftUI — of course — and the model I created yesterday. I have to admit, that I'm quite surprised, how easily you can add some machine learning to the app — and probably acquire some venture capital, as your app now has machine learning!!!!!1

As always: thanks for reading. Feels good to be back on track with this tutorial :-)

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 26

Nathan Mattes — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 14:41:45 +0000

I just finished the 26th day aka second day in a row 🎉🥳

For the first time ever, I did something with Core/Create ML, as this is part of the 4th project: I trained a model! I also wrote a rather simple ViewModifier to try to relearn, what I forgot during the last couple of days.

I actually don't feel bad about that break, but nevertheless it felt good, when I read what Paul had so say about this:

However, I want to say that if at any point you’re feeling tired, or if life just gets in the way, take a break!

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 25

Nathan Mattes — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 19:13:59 +0000

This is the first time in ten days that I attended the SwiftUI-course by Paul Hudson. I'm taking a few days off from work right now, but the week before my vacation was pretty stressful and I didn't have the energy in the evenings. So I missed a few days.

But not anymore! I'm back on track, hopefully. I just did the 25th day and it was all about consolidation: There were some recap and I had to apply some things I learned about ten days ago. That was pretty hard, actually, as it feels like that I forgot plenty of things in those ten days I didn't do any SwiftUI.

At the end of the day, there was the challenge to build a rather simple version of Rock paper scissors. Mine looks very basic, but it works:

I hope, that I can gain some speed again in the next couple of days and I really appreciated, that Paul gave some hints and reminded me, that:

This should be a fun exercise

Beginning (again) is hard, I guess. But I did it, at least for today. I'm looking forward to tomorrow, again.

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 24

Nathan Mattes — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 09:34:00 +0000

Day 24, or as Paul says: Project 3, part 2. There were some challenges, in which I had to change the former projects to use a view composition, conditional modifiers and I had also to create a custom ViewModifier next a View-extension. I figured, that I'm still learning and I will need some more practice, especially with ViewModifiers, but that's okay.

100 Days of SwiftUI — Day 23

Nathan Mattes — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:23:41 +0000

Day 23, so this is the 23rd blogpost. I learned about more details of SwiftUI: Why it uses structs, how to create my own custom modifiers and how I can compose views from different structs, which conform to the View-protocol. So, this was interesting, let's see, what tomorrow will bring.