12 Weeks as a iOS Developer Intern — Week Five
I gave a presentation, worked on an iPad app and attended the company picnic!
Advanced Swift
I gave a 30 minute presentation on Advanced Swift by Chris Eidhof. I learned a lot about what the capabilities of the Swift language and even about how things like how for loops actually work underneath the hood. I wrote about eight pages of notes and created a powerpoint with 28 slides to prepare for the presentation. I gave the presentation at a iOS department company meeting. It was empowering to realize during the presentation that there are things from the book that not even the senior iOS engineers knew because no one knows everything there is to know, and that’s okay!
I was super nervous in the days leading up to the presentation, it ended up going well. Aside from the first slide where I listed the wrong author… — I was just checking that y’all were paying attention 😅 LOL jk. In hindsight, it’s a great idea to practice giving the presentation in front of other to catch those kinds of errors before the real presentation.
Working on an iPad app
Prior to this week, I had never worked on an iPad app before so the opportunity to do so was exciting!
The only very noticeable difference I noted was that the screen size of an iPad is obviously much bigger than an iPhone 😂. When I ran the app using the iPad simulator, it was much slower than the actual iPad device. This is important to note because some bugs of the app will not be apparent in the simulator but will be apparent on the iPad device. — always test the app on the device.
Here’s a few things I learned about this week:
UIVisualEffectView
UIVisualEffectView is what is used to create a blur effect. Pictured above is a modal UIView with an ImageView over a UIView. Notice how the the blur next to the x button is darker, that is because there is a dark colored menu bar behind this modal UIView. First create a UIView that will have the blur effect.
Then the blurView has to be placed on top of the content you would like to blur. For example if you would like to blur an entire image that is pinned to the edges of the superview, the blurView must also be pinned to the edges of the superView.
When adding the views, think of it like a stack of papers. The imageView is added on the stack before the blurView. Then the blurView is like a piece of translucent paper added right after the imageView and on top of it.
Using shadow to achieve a gray blur effect
If you look at this blurView, it has a grey color. It is white behind the blurView. It should would be white right? So how did this happen? There is no way to set a color for this blurring effect. This was accomplished by adding a shadow to the modally presented UIView and setting the shadow radius to extend all the way to the edges of the screen. It’s much smoother looking to animate the shadow.
Giving a blur effect a color
While I was researching on how to create a gray blur, I did come across a suggestion of putting a colored UIView underneath the blurView. Though this requires tweaking of the alpha of both the colored UIView and blurView’s alphas until you get the perfect outcome of the color you are looking for. I tried for quite awhile to get the perfect shade of gray according to the app screen’s design but I couldn’t get the exact shade. The shadow solution gave me the exact shade in gray that I was looking for.
Company picnic
Fuzz’s picnic was at prospect park. It was nice to meet more people from the company and chat with them over hotdogs, burgers and drinks. I’m glad Fuzz has relaxing events like this that allowed me to bond with coworkers in a relaxing setting. It was forecasted to start thunder storming at eight but it came a little bit early so we all went to a nearby bar. It was a pleasant way to end the week. Goodbye week five and hello week 6!
Read about week four as an iOS developer intern here
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