Introduction
Hey guys. So usually the posts we put up here involve screencasts and presentations, but we are going to start also posting small less time consuming pieces for the site. Today I bring to you a small project involving NSTimers. Today we are going to build an app that represents a horse race. We will create a view with 6 small UIView squares with a blue background at the bottom of the screen, we will use a timer to move a random one of them forward a random amount of distance. Let’s get started!
Source
You can get the source here: NSTimerDemo
Steps
Step 1
Create a view based application in xCode. Call it whatever.
Step 2
In your view controller class header file add:
NSTimer *myTimer;
Step 3
In your view controller class, uncomment out the viewDidLoad method and fill in the following code:
- (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; CGRect workingFrame; workingFrame.origin.x = 15; workingFrame.origin.y = 400; workingFrame.size.width = 40; workingFrame.size.height = 40; for(int i = 0; i < 6; i++) { UIView *myView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:workingFrame]; [myView setTag:i]; [myView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor blueColor]]; workingFrame.origin.x = workingFrame.origin.x + workingFrame.size.width + 10; [self.view addSubview:myView]; } myTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:.1 target:self selector:@selector(moveACar) userInfo:nil repeats:YES]; }
Step 4
In your view controller class, add the following method:
-(void)moveACar { int r = rand() % 6; NSLog(@"My number is %d", r); for(UIView *aView in [self.view subviews]) { if([aView tag] == r) { int movement = rand() % 100; CGRect workingFrame = aView.frame; workingFrame.origin.y = workingFrame.origin.y - movement; [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:NULL]; [UIView setAnimationDuration:.2]; [aView setFrame:workingFrame]; [UIView commitAnimations]; if(workingFrame.origin.y < 0) { [myTimer invalidate]; } } } }
Conclusion
So that is it. Timers are really cool and come in handy for all sorts of small problems in a project. Happy coding.
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Good woodworking,