RecyclerView: Android's UITableView cousin


Posted on May 27, 2016 by William Welbes

In iOS development, UITableView holds an important and prominent place at the table. Apple has consistently used UITableView throughout iOS since the very first release of the iPhone and subsequently the SDK. The pattern is repeated throughout many of the apps on the platform as well. If you develop in UIKit, you will undoubtedly have a strong understanding of UITableView, UITableViewDataSource, and UITableViewDelegate. What about Android?

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Visualizing the audio frequency spectrum on iOS via the Accelerate Framework and FFT(Fast Fourier Transform)


Posted on March 04, 2016 by William Welbes

It’s not every day that I get to use a Fourier Transform, but today was one of those days. Over the past week, I’ve had a chance to experiment with the Accelerate Framework on iOS. The Accelerate Framework implements the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) as a part of the resource and speed optimized transforms available via the SDK for vDSP (Digital Signal Processing).

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CoreAudioMixer - An investigation into CoreAudio (AUGraph and AVAudioEngine) on iOS


Posted on February 26, 2016 by William Welbes

In an effort to learn about CoreAudio on iOS, I implemented CoreAudioMixer for iOS with the goal of simply mixing a few audio tracks together via the CoreAudio APIs.

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Looking for a way to print shipping labels on your Mac?


Posted on January 04, 2016 by William Welbes

I recently created and launched Easy Shipper on the Mac app store, enabling Mac users to quote, buy and print shipping labels..

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A Bigcommerce Stores API in Swift for iOS and OSX


Posted on December 21, 2015 by William Welbes

Looking for a way to connect to the Bigcommerce Stores API from iOS or OSX? I recently developed a Swift API that can be used within iOS and OSX apps.

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The Presidents for iOS: A Welbes Family App


Posted on February 01, 2015 by William Welbes

With Presidents' Day in the United States approaching on February 16, my wife Mandi prepared a unit on the US Presidents for my son Lincoln. Mandi gathered up all kinds of great materials including work books, videos and hands on materials. As we were chatting about the materials, I took a look at some of the options for iPhone and iPad apps in the App Store. We found a couple options, but nothing seemed to be what I had in mind.

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iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Foam Core Models


Posted on September 10, 2014 by William Welbes

With the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus yesterday, Apple launched two new models that are much larger than the current iPhone 5 and 5s form factor. Since I'm eligible for upgrade, I'm planning to preorder one of the devices on Friday when they go on sale.

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CloudKit Subscriptions and Push Notifications in iOS8


Posted on August 28, 2014 by William Welbes

As I have been implementing an app using Apple's new CloudKit for iOS 8, I've come across a few hurdles, as expected. It's a brand new platform as a service offering from Apple, a company that doesn't yet have a strong history in the domain. That being said, it is a pretty compelling offering and there is a lot to like.

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Catch: An Angler's Tale


Posted on July 28, 2014 by William Welbes

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert angler. But I’m honored to be invited on an exclusive fishing trip every year with good friends from college. It’s a tradition that started shortly after college and is something that I look forward to each year. However, in the past 3 years, the fishing trip always seemed to be scheduled during Apple’s Developer Conference week in June. There are not a lot of things that would keep me from going on that fishing trip, but WWDC was one of them. I suppose the birth of Lily (number 3), in June of last year, also kept me away. I guess that’s a bit more important than a developer conference.

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Hello Swift Playground with UIKit in Xcode 6


Posted on July 25, 2014 by William Welbes

With the launch of Xcode 6 and iOS 8 at WWDC this year, Apple also introduced a new programming language called Swift. One of the cool new features of Swift that’s integrated into Xcode 6 is Playgrounds - a place to play with code and view output in real time. Over the years developing on iOS, I’ve often cluttered my projects directory with projects named SomethingTest, HelloSomething, etc. as I create small projects to test some code. Enter playgrounds in swift to replace those types of projects that never got committed. It seems that playgrounds could now follow inside a project and enable better collaboration with other team members on development code.

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