iOS 10 Screencast: Dynamic Sticker Packs in iMessage Apps

@cato

If you’re creating your own browser then when you create an MSStickerBrowserViewController or MSStickerBrowserView then you can provide the MSStickerSize in the initialiser.

See the docs:

https://developer.apple.com/reference/messages/msstickerbrowserviewcontroller

sam

Hi there, how do you dynamically pull images from a server into the app? In this tutorial you manually dragged them in, how do you go about calling them in dynamically? Thanks!

Hi @tmunyaka,

Creating a sticker pack from dynamically downloaded images shouldn’t be too difficult at all. You’re starting in the right place - you’ll need to have an actual app rather than a simple sticker pack. That means you can start with an MSStickerBrowserViewController, and supply the stickers as in this video.

To obtain the images from the web, you’ll need to build the networking component yourself, but NSURLSession makes it pretty straightforward. If you’re stuck on this bit, I highly recommend taking a look at this video series:

https://videos.raywenderlich.com/courses/networking-with-nsurlsession/lessons/1

Hope that helps

sam

Hey Sam. I’m not currently a subscriber, but I found this tutorial while searching for help on how to create custom layouts in my iOS sticker pack. Before I pull the trigger and subscribe, I’m wondering if you can share a few screenshots of what you’re teaching us to build. Just so I have an idea of what level of customization I can expect. FYI … I’m wanting to add tabs across the top of my sticker pack like this one … ‎Sticker Pals! 800 Stickers from David Lanham on the App Store

Hi @double3

Please be under no false impressions that this screencast is in the form of a tutorial. It is merely a brief foray into the process behind building a dynamic sticker pack.

In this screencast I build a simple dynamic sticker pack using the sticker collection view controller, the contents of which you can filter via a switch. The important thing to understand is that once you’ve covered the basics of a dynamic sticker pack, the rest is all just standard UIKit.

It might also be worth considering taking a look at iOS 10 by Tutorials, which is based on the content of the entire series of iOS 10 screencasts. This is up-to-date (the screencasts are not - they are pinned to whichever beta of iOS they were written in) and written in a more tutorial style. If you subscribe you can download copy of the book for free, or it’s available to purchase on its own.

Hope that’s helpful

sam

Thanks @samdavies for yet another awesome screencast from you, this time on building a dynamic sticker pack for iMessage! It got me inspired to try myself and yesterday I got a mail from Apple saying that my Balloonimal Stickers was released. I´m so happy… Thank you Sam! :grinning:

1 Like

@jeppe_07 — congratulations :tada: I’m glad you found the screencast helpful, and hope your sticker pack is successful!

sam