Shaking It Up With iOS Shake Gestures

Today’s quick tip is about adding that super cool (or super annoying) iOS shake gesture. Now typically I’m not a big fan of the shake gesture, I feel like it’s a little difficult to trigger and I’m always afraid that I might send my phone flying straight into the Apple Store for a replacement. I also feel like if the shake gesture activates a feature I might want to use multiple times in rapid succession, it’s not a good user experience. Despite all of my bad criticism towards the shake gesture, I was working on a project that called for a random selection and the shake gesture also identified with the name of the app, so I decided to add it in as a novelty.

The shake gesture can be added in two quick steps:

Make your VC the first responder (can be done via code)
Implement the motionEnded:withEvent method.

In short:

- (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder
{
    return YES;
}

- (void)motionEnded:(UIEventSubtype)motion
          withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    if (motion == UIEventSubtypeMotionShake) {
        NSLog(@"Shake, shake, shake senora~");
    }
}

Happy shaking and try to avoid dropping your phones!