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iOS Nerd Sniped Swift

UITextView, autocorrect, and custom attributes

For this week’s “Nerd Snipe”, I spent way too much time at work trying to track down a pesky bug related to our editor. Long story short, we send some custom NSAttributedString.Keys to signify differences in rich text. For instance, a heading attribute with an integer value may tell a parser to wrap text in an <h2> when converting the string to HTML.

Oddly, sometimes that special attribute wouldn’t be included when text was autocorrected, so the generated HTML wasn’t always what we expected. After a lot of digging I believe this could be a bug in UITextView (or maybe NSTextStorage).

Inspecting the value of attrString in the NSTextStorage function func replaceCharacters(in range: NSRange, with attrString: NSAttributedString) after autocorrecting some text shows that it only seems to include attributes that were defined in Foundation (e.g. NSFont, etc.), but not our custom ones.

Regular typing works fine – you see all the expected attributes set in textView.typingAttributes.

In scenarios like these I like to make the simplest example to help confirm I understand it, so I’ve made a repo demonstrating the issue in case it’s helpful for anyone.

Categories
Swift SwiftUI

Squishy buttons!

Categories
Swift SwiftUI

Faux Notch Fun

I’ve seen a lot of these little “fake notch” apps pop up since Apple’s new MacBooks were announced, but I didn’t see a lot of source code – so of course I was nerd sniped.

Here’s a basic example of making one using AppKit and SwiftUI!

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iOS Projects Swift SwiftUI

Wyze Cam in iOS

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Arduino Coding iOS Projects Swift SwiftUI

Flip Dots!

I saw flip dots (also called flip discs) last year for the first time and instantly knew I needed some in my life. If you’re not familiar with them, check out how they work!

The particular model I have is the ALFAZETA XY5, which may be the easiest way to get up and running, but certainly not the least expensive.

After getting the board, all you need is:

  1. 24V power supply
  2. Something that talks over RS485 (in my case I used an ESP8266 connected to a MAX3485 board)
  3. Their documentation that defines the controller data protocol

I plan to write in more detail how it all works, but for this demo the stack is:

  1. SwiftUI app that runs SwiftGFXWrapper (which is mainly Adafruit’s GFX Library under the hood)
  2. The app sends the entire pixel buffer over UDP to the ESP8266
  3. The ESP8266 sends data to the XY5 over RS485 using their controller’s protocol

Update: Here’s more info on how it all works!

Categories
Projects Swift SwiftUI

Playground support for SwiftGFXWrapper

For even easier prototyping, I’ve added Swift Playground support to my SwiftGFXWrapper project!

Categories
Projects Swift SwiftUI

Adafruit GFX -> Swift

Another fun project from a few weekends ago: Wrapping the Adafruit GFX in Objective C and bridging to Swift for some neat 8-bit effects!

The most interesting component of this project so far has been building a Swift closure that is executed in C as a const void *. This was new territory for me and a lot of fun to figure out!

This (work in progress) repo has been open sourced!

Categories
Projects Swift SwiftUI

Retro Menu Bar calculator

I’ve always wanted to play around with Menu Bar apps, so I decided to make an easy to access retro calculator in SwiftUI.

Categories
Swift

Diving into SwiftUI

Categories
Arduino Projects Raspberry Pi Swift

Controlling the Rover’s camera with an iPad gyroscope

The Rover got its own iOS app and I implemented a neat way to control the camera servos.