One feature that I really wanted to add to Refining Fire was the ability to read the entire chapter for a randomly chosen Bible verse. So for instance, if the verse was Psalm 23.4, a user could read all of Psalm 23. I decided to use a UIWebView to display the chapter content from a popular Bible-reading website.

Sometimes the website would take a moment to load and at first glance, it seemed like the feature was broken. I knew I needed to add some kind of spinner or loading bar but wasn’t sure how to tie a UIActivityIndicatorView to the loading of a web page. After searching Stack Overflow, I found the simplest solution. Here’s what it looks like in Swift after declaring a UIActivityIndicatorView called “spinner” and a UIWebView called “webView”:

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        
        spinner.hidesWhenStopped = true
        
        webView.delegate = self

        let url = NSURL(string: urlString)
        let urlRequest = NSURLRequest(URL: url!)
        webView.loadRequest(urlRequest)
        
    }
    
    func webView(webView: UIWebView, shouldStartLoadWithRequest request: NSURLRequest, navigationType: UIWebViewNavigationType) -> Bool {
        spinner.startAnimating()
        return true
    }

    func webViewDidFinishLoad(webView: UIWebView) {
        spinner.stopAnimating()
    }
    
    func webView(webView: UIWebView, didFailLoadWithError error: NSError) {
        spinner.stopAnimating()
    }

Don’t forget to add UIWebViewDelegate to the class definition!

Note: This is the fifth entry in a series of posts about writing my first iOS app. The app is currently in review, and until it is rejected or approved, I plan to write something every day about what I’ve learned.