Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/a-document-scanner-in-an-afternoon/ Apple's document camera on iOS 13+, a Vision rectangle-detection fallback for older devices, enhancing scans with Core Image, saving locally, sharing PNGs and printing Scan Via Cam app icon Document scanning used to be a serious computer-vision project: find the page's edges, correct the perspective, flatten the lighting, sharpen the text. Today, most of that is a system view controller, but there's st...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/a-practical-guide-to-ios-haptics/ The three layers of haptic APIs, when to use each, building custom patterns with intensity and sharpness, AHAP files, looping and speed control, and two deprecations to know about in iOS 27 Haptics Explorer app icon Haptics are the most under-designed part of most iOS apps. Developers add .impactOccurred() to a button, feel it once on their own phone and move on. But haptics are a vocabulary: a light tic...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/animating-algorithms-in-swiftui/ Separate the algorithm from the animation, record every step as data, then play it back with play, pause, speed and scrubbing, accessibly DSA Master app icon When I was learning data structures, the textbook diagrams were always a frame or two short. You'd see the array before the merge and the array after, and the interesting part, the moment the two halves interleave, happened somewhere off the page. T...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-chromatic-guitar-tuner-on-ios/ From microphone samples to "A2, +3 cents": session setup, an input tap, autocorrelation with vDSP, note maths, smoothing and tuning presets Guitar Tuner: Chromatic app icon A tuner is the most honest app you can build. There's no design trick that hides a wrong answer: the guitarist plucks the low E, looks at the needle and then checks it with their ear. If the needle jitters, lands on the wrong ...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-hashtag-copier-for-ios/ How to normalise tags so they actually work, model bundled categories with user edits, copy to the pasteboard without tripping privacy prompts, and redesign a "copy 30 tags" app now that Instagram allows five Hashtags Creator app icon Hashtags Creator was one of my first App Store apps. The idea was simple: pick a category, and a list of popular hashtags is copied and ready to paste into Instagram. You ...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-live-temple-darshan-app-for-ios/ Playing live and recorded video with AVPlayer, keeping darshan going in picture-in-picture, falling back gracefully when a stream is down, scheduling aarti reminders in the temple's time zone for devotees anywhere in the world, "Watch Now" and "Remind Later" actions, a next-aarti widget, and opening a temple in Maps the iOS 26 way Mandir Darshan app icon For many people, a daily visit to the te...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-live-ios-component-catalogue/ One registry for every component, hosting UIKit inside SwiftUI with UIViewRepresentable, wrapping the system pickers, comparing UIKit and SwiftUI versions on one screen, tag filters, search, favourites and recently viewed, and keeping copyable snippets honest Catalog Every iOS developer has done this: you need a segmented control, or a date picker in compact style, or a blurred toolbar, and you ca...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-low-latency-virtual-piano-and-drum-kit-on-ios-with-avaudioe/ Samplers for pitched instruments, a player-node pool for drums, a multi-touch keyboard that handles chords and glissandos, and note names for beginners Drums n Piano app icon The test for a virtual instrument is brutal and immediate: tap a key, and the sound has to arrive with your finger, not after it. Play a chord and you expect three notes, not one. Drag your fing...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-real-time-mic-to-speaker-app-on-ios-with-avaudioengine/ Live audio passthrough in Swift: session setup, permissions, feedback, interruptions and route changes, from shipping an app that does exactly this Virtual Mic app icon Most audio tutorials on iOS cover one of two things: playing a file, or recording one. Very few cover the strange in-between case where the microphone and the speaker are both live at the same time, and wh...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-a-tap-to-match-marble-game-with-spritekit-and-swiftui/ A complete walkthrough of the game loop: marbles that settle under real physics, finding touching same-colour clusters, a pause-safe countdown, lives and levels, Lightning, Heart and Bomb power-ups, and particle effects, all hosted in SwiftUI with SpriteView Marbles Popperz app icon Every game developer has a "small" game that taught them how games actually work. Mine is Mar...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-an-admob-earnings-dashboard-for-ios/ Signing in with ASWebAuthenticationSession and PKCE, storing tokens safely in the Keychain, calling networkReport:generate, decoding a streamed report, turning micros into money, why "today" is a Los Angeles day, live earning rates, and caching for offline use AdEarnings Pro app icon If you have apps with ads, you know the habit: open the AdMob website on your phone, pinch, zoom, wait for the...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-an-offline-quotes-app-in-swiftui/ Bundling and importing a large library into SwiftData, picking a "quote of the day" deterministically, search with recent queries, collections, time-zone-safe streaks, rendering shareable quote cards with ImageRenderer, and Light/Dark/Auto themes Facts and Quotes app icon A quotes app looks like the simplest thing in the App Store: a list of text and a share button. Then you build one and the re...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-an-offline-ebook-reader-for-ios/ Downloading and storing public-domain books, previewing before you download, a UITextView-based reader with font, line height, margin and theme settings, saving your place as a character offset instead of a page number, bookmarks and highlights (including iOS 26's multi-range selection), reading time estimates and reading statistics Novels Club app icon There's something special about reading a c...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/building-an-offline-first-bible-reader-on-ios/ How I'd structure a scripture app that works on a plane: a read-only text database, fast search, user data that follows you between devices, read-aloud and a verse-of-the-day widget Bible Study AI app icon The first app I ever published under my App Store developer name was a Bible reader. It went live on 20 April 2020, a day ahead of the next few apps I shipped that month, and today it's ca...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/convert-as-you-type-currency-conversion-in-swift/ Why Double is the wrong type for money, how to derive any cross rate from one base, keeping rates fresh without a refresh button, and formatting 150+ currencies correctly Currency Converter : Fast app icon A currency converter is used at the worst possible moments: at a market stall abroad, at a checkout page in another currency, in a taxi with a meter running. Nobody wants to tap "Conver...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/drag-to-connect-and-game-center-leaderboards-in-a-swiftui-puzzle-game/ A dot-matching board drawn with Canvas and TimelineView, drag gestures that chain same-colour dots, speed-based scoring and rising difficulty, pause and resume, and modern Game Center: authentication, submitting scores, the access point, and what iOS 26 deprecates Speck Match app icon Speck Match is a puzzle game about speed. You tap and drag to connect matching colou...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/from-barcode-to-pdf/ Scanning a box to add a medication, a SwiftData model shared with widgets, adherence statistics, a doctor-ready PDF report, and CSV/JSON export that keeps everything on the device Track Your Pills app icon I have two medication apps on the App Store. The first, Daily Pills | Reminder, does one thing: remind you on time and count your supply. I've written about its notification engineering separately. The second, Trac...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/medication-reminders-that-actually-fire/ Repeating calendar triggers, a notification budget, "Taken" and "Snooze" actions, run-out dates and on-device privacy, from building a pill reminder app Daily Pills | Reminder app icon Most apps can afford a missed notification. A medication reminder can't. If the 9 p.m. reminder silently doesn't arrive, someone misses a dose, and they stop trusting the app the same evening. Daily Pills | Reminde...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/shipping-a-4k-wallpaper-app-without-running-out-of-memory/ Decoded-image maths, thumbnails that don't decode the full file, a blur editor that keeps edges clean, saving with the minimum permission, and why your app can't set the wallpaper itself Wallpapers HD: Exotic 4K app icon A wallpaper app looks like the simplest kind of app there is: a grid of pictures, tap one, save it. Then you load forty 4K images into a scrolling grid on an old...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/stop-hand-rolling-unit-conversions/ Built-in units, custom dimensions, non-linear converters, locale-aware input and output, and the temperature trap that catches everyone Units Converter & Calculator app icon Every unit converter I've seen in a code review starts the same way: a dictionary of conversion factors, a switch on the category and a special case for temperature that someone added after the bug report. It works, until the t...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/text-plus-audio-fully-offline/ Bundled recitation audio, verse-by-verse highlighting from a cue sheet, background playback, Now Playing controls and the interruptions you must handle, on an app that still supports iOS 11 Hanuman Chalisa app icon Some apps are used in a very particular moment. A prayer app is opened in the morning, often before anything else, frequently by someone older who isn't interested in settings screens, and someti...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/the-device-side-of-apns/ Permission, registration, device tokens, foreground presentation and payload inspection, plus the exact HTTP/2 request your backend needs to send Push Notification – Client app icon Every backend developer who has implemented Apple push notifications knows this moment. The server code is written and the request goes out. APNs answers 200, and nothing appears on the phone. Or APNs answers 400 BadDeviceToken, and y...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/the-sending-side-of-apns/ Finding push certificates in the Keychain, importing .p12 files, answering APNs's client-certificate challenge in URLSession, building the exact request (path, headers, payload), sandbox vs production, silent pushes, and reading APNs's error responses, all without a server Push Notification In my article on Push Notification – Client, I covered the device side of APNs: permission, registration, device tokens and...

Originally published at https://bestlatestapps.com/blog/tic-tac-toe-in-swiftui-done-properly/ The smallest game worth architecting: an immutable board, testable rules, a view that just renders state, and the classic AI you can bolt on in 40 lines Tic Tac Toe : Time Pass app icon Tic tac toe is the "hello world" of game development, which is exactly why it's worth doing properly. It's small enough to hold in your head, but it still has every piece a real game needs: state, rules, turns, an end...