Having a website pop with a cool background can be a great thing. But using an image may be distracting even with a blur. I’ll walk you through the steps I take to use an SVG pattern background in order to allow the webpage to have more depth without sacrificing readability.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Hitting the bullseye with Dart
This year’s Google I/O introduced to me the Flutter SDK – Google’s mobile app SDK for creating iOS and Android Apps with one language – Dart. With Flutter’s Release Preview being announced I’ve started learning Dart in order to use Flutter and I’ve found it very easy to pick up. I’ll cover an introduction to Dart in this article. Continue reading
Refactoring Storyboards With Storyboard References
A common question facing an iOS team when starting a new App is whether to use Storyboards or not. As a professional iOS developer I don’t think this is an either / or question – you need to know both how to programmatically define and use UIViews (including Auto Layout) and how to effectively use Storyboards in a team environment.
At WWDC 2015 with Xcode 7 Apple introduced Storyboard References and the ability to Refactor your large storyboards into more manageable Storyboards from within Interface Builder to avoid the Storyboard merge conflicts. Continue reading
UITabBar Customizations
In an Instagram Clone app I started working on I had to make the following two customizations in order to match Instagram.
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Changing the tint color on the tab bar and
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Removing the bar item text in the tab bar
Swift 3 Challenge 4: Being Cool
Today’s code challenge is about being cool.
Problem Description:
A number is cool if it’s a multiple of 11 or if it is one more than a multiple of 11.
Return true if the given non-negative number is cool.
Swift 3 Challenge 3: Order
Continuing our Swift 3 Challenges today’s challenge has to do with order.
Problem Description:
Given three ints, first, second, third, return true if
the second is greater than first, and third is greater than second.
However, with the exception that if the parameter “itsOk” is true,
second does not need to be greater than first but still better be less than third.
Swift 3 Challenge Deux: Birds Singing
Another day, another Swift 3 puzzle. This one is about singing birds. Remember to try it before you look at my solution.
The problem description states:
The birds in Florida like to sing during favorable temperatures.
In particular, they sing if the temperature is between 60 and 90 (inclusive).
Unless it is summer, then the upper limit is 100 instead of 90.
Given an int temperature and a boolean isSummer,
return true if the birds are singing and false otherwise.
Swift 3 Fight Club: Challenge Day 1
I’ve started doing code puzzles from CodingBat. CodingBat is a project by Nick Parlante, a computer science lecturer at Stanford. Continue reading
Open Source Swift on Ubuntu
Two years ago I wrote an entry on Cocoa Programming on Ubuntu that relied on the stable and mature but outdated Objective-C based GNUstep. It was hackey but it was the only way to do it then.
Last week Apple just made its self imposed date of delivering its new, modern, platform language, Swift, to the open source community and making it easy to use on Ubuntu. I have been itching to upgrade to 15.10 and what better excuse than to work on Swift.

Craig Federighi Introduces Open Source Swift on Linux at WWDC 2015
This entry is my walkthrough on the steps I took to get a working Swift IDE on Ubuntu. Tl;dr: its like super easy and fun. Continue reading
Cool New Stuff in Swift 2
At WWDC 2015 we found out that Apple wasn’t kidding about Swift. Introduced just a year before at WWDC 2014 a year later it was difficult to find any Objective-C slides in any of the sessions and it was clear Apple doubled-down on Swift and it is the future of Apple software development. The cherry on top was Open Sourcing it.
If you have been following along then you know Swift and Xcode have been somewhat of a moving incremental target evolving from 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 and now 2.0 in just under a year. Because of these incremental bumps I thought I would highlight a checklist of seven magnificent things composed of what I think are some of the cool new things you’ll find in your Swift 2 journeys as Swift enters year two. Continue reading