In modern iOS applications, users expect to be able to access their data across all of their devices. Thanks to the wide array of hardware produced by Apple, this can span from portable devices such as iPhone and iPad, all the way to our desktop computers and TVs. Many apps have their data supplied by back-end services, making shared access relatively trivial across multiple platforms. However, for apps that are responsible for managing data without such provision, we can build our own data stores on top of iCloud in order to serve our users with the information they expect on whichever device they choose to use. Read more…
Natural language user interfaces are everywhere in tech these days. Amazon wants to assist you in the home with Alexa in the Amazon Echo. Apple recently opened up Siri to third party developers to enable you to book rides, send messages, and more, just by speaking to your phone. Google and Microsoft are both in on the act too. The soon to be released AirPods allow for a simple double tap of an AirPod to begin speaking to Siri. Read more…
Back when iOS 9 was released, Apple made great advances to make the system Spotlight search more useful to users by allowing third-party apps to integrate their data with the Spotlight database (for more details, see Indexing App Content with Core Spotlight). By allowing your application's data to be indexed, you can increase engagement with your app by allowing users to find their content in one convenient location. Read more…
Starting from where we left off last week (Continuity for Apple Watch and iPhone with Handoff) we will be adding Handoff support to our Counties sample application to allow transferring tasks between the iPhone and iPad. Before reading this post familiarise yourself with last week's as it provides the basis for the technique that will be discussed in this article. Read more…
Continuity was introduced with iOS 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite, and was primarily a method for first-party Apple applications to allow for transferring a task that was already in progress between an iOS device and a Mac. Very few third party appliations picked up support, so the feature only provided limited usability for most users. Read more…
The search functionality built in to iOS has for years been a weak point of the operating system, mainly due to being limited to only searching within first-party apps like Mail and Messages. This left the majority of users' content siloed in third-party applications, only to be retrieved by search functions included within those apps (if any). Read more…