I’ve named mine ‘StickFarBrowserViewController’. Go ahead and get started by adding a new swift file to your project. So, we’ll need to create a custom instance of MSStickerBrowserViewController to display our stickers. The MSStickerBrowserViewController is the View Controller that will be holding our stickers and handling gestures to pick stickers up and place them in conversation. The other new class that we’ll be interacting with is the MSStickerBrowserViewController. MSMessagesAppViewController is the view controller that interacts directly with the messages app, but for now we’ll just be loading data into the messages, so you can delete all of the functions besides viewDidLoad and didReceiveMemoryWarning. This is a subclass of MSMessagesAppViewController. Within ‘MessagesExtensions’ you’ll see our principal class – MessagesViewController. Frameworks and Projects won’t be touched during this tutorial. StickFar is where you’ll place your app icons, and Message Extension is where we’ll do our coding. You’ll see that Xcode creates four directories – your app name (I named mine ‘StickFar’), MessagesExtension, Frameworks, and Products. Grab Xcode version 8 (if you haven’t already) and create a new project. My main objective with this tutorial is to introduce the basic classes used by the messages framework, giving you the groundwork needed to create a more dynamic and interactive messages app in the future. Setting up one of these sticker apps isn’t going to make you a messages expert, but it is a fun way (haven’t you always wanted your own personal emoji?) to get your feet wet in what promises to be a seriously interesting field of tech. Here’s a quick look at the finished product in action: My own app will – of course – be loaded with a few LookFar-themed stickers. These stickers can be sent in the body of a text the way that emojis can, but can also be peeled up and plopped on top of some text or an image in the conversation. A ‘sticker app’ is the term apple is using for the most basic iMessages apps that will serve up what are basically custom emojis – or stickers. I will showcase some of the basic iMessages classes and objects here by creating a custom sticker app. I quickly downloaded the beta version of Xcode 8, and looked over Apple’s documentation and its WWDC demos to start tinkering. So, my first question as an iOS developer is: how do I build one of these apps? A messaging/newsfeed-style portal is among the more promising options, and Apple has leverage to easily transition users to this new system there are hundreds of millions of iPhone users, many of whom use their messages on an hourly basis. Combine these factors with an ever-growing number of users spending more time on their phones than on other devices, and it’s become pretty obvious that a new system will eventually replace the mobile browser. Smaller screen sizes, slow load times, and the tech/design hurdles of building a page for so many different devices and browsers have led to lower returns for advertisers and web developers serving content and ads through mobile browsers. There is another factor to keep in mind: the traditional browser experience hasn’t transitioned well to mobile. Stratechery’s Ben Thompson put it well when he responded to Facebook’s announcement that it would be investing significant resources into the messaging space by predicting that “messages will become to smartphones what the browser became for PCs”. So many tech companies are now subscribing to this concept that it’s becoming unclear whether the shift to messaging apps will be caused by a real consumer need, or if tech companies will force a change by building their systems with messaging in mind. It’s becoming increasingly likely that future smartphone users will spend most of their time in their ‘messages’ app and interact with other apps from that portal. As a consumer, the announcement’s interesting because it gives further evidence that we’re starting to see a paradigm shift in how we spend time on our smartphones. Apple’s announcement that they’ll be releasing a messages SDK to third-party developers is super excitingĪs a developer, it’s exciting because it means that I’ll be able to create apps that interact directly with the messages app – services that would let smartphone users do things like chat with an Uber driver, or send an animated, snapchat-style selfie over text.
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