Foto+

Foto+ is an iOS 8 photo discovery app written entirely in Swift. For now, Foto+ uses the Instagram API to display nearby photos (using device's location).

This app can be a reference for using AVFoundation, CoreLocation, and UICollectionViews in Swift.


Get Started

###Setup There are no special dependencies for this project. Get started by cloning the repository and building the app in XCode 6.

git clone git@github.com:gdaniele/fotoPlus.git
cd fotoPlus
open FotoPlus.xcodeproj/

1. Build Foto+ on an iOS 8 device or in the simulator*
2. Allow Location and camera access when prompted by iOS
3. Log into a valid Instagram account
4. Click the Location Name in the title bar to swap to feeds of other nearby locations

• Note that for iOS Simulator and devices without camera, CameraViewController and associated AVFoundation camera functionality is not supported.

###A Note about XCode This app was built and tested with XCode 6 Beta 7. For best compatibility, this version of XCode should be used until this project is updated.

Functional Overview

###Take a photo 

###View photos from the closest Instagram Location 

###View Other Nearby Locations by Tapping Title 

Technical Overview

###LazyLoading with Closures and NSOperation FotoPlus uses a three part lazy load to keep the UI responsive while metadata and images are downloaded, parsed, and presented.

1. No data has been loaded (UINavigationBar shows status)
2. Text-only data has been loaded (placeholder image loaded)
3. Images are loaded asynchronously

If the UICollectionView is scrolling, downloads do not begin until scrolling is finished.


###New iOS 8 Permissions 

iOS 8 requires setting an app-level description of GPS usage of the device for authorization. New in iOS 8 is that iOS will only ask the user for authorization is a reason is stated by setting theNSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescriptionkey in the Info.plist.

In cases where permission is not granted or a location update fails, FotoPlus defaults to a saved location to simulate showing nearby photos.

Next Steps

###Swift Housekeeping Swift is a young language. Class and static variables are currently not supported. This app will likely need to be updated for the release of iOS 8 and XCode 6.

###Unliking Photos The InstagramAPI class should support unlike requests, but the Instagram API currently does not support unliking photos. Unliking could be supporting in the future using an NSURLSession to make a request with an delete HTTP header method.

###Persistent Data FotoPlus requests data from Instagram each time a feed is presented to the view. State data is never saved, so a force quit or device restart will delete information from the app. Next steps here would be to use NSCoder or CoreData to persist data efficiently.