how can I distinguish whether user tapped the UIButton quickly or put and hold it in Swift?

Question

I'm creating a camera app in swift and I have a UIButton. I want to propose two options: when user single taps the button - it takes photo and when user holds his finger on a button - it records the movie until user releases the button.

I have functions for recording and taking photo, now I need to distinguish the user action on a button.

Available actions for this button are:

and I tried to start recording on touch down and stop recording on touch up inside, but then I don't know where should I put the code responsible for taking photos. If I put it also in touch down then when user starts recording movie - will also take a photo, and I want to avoid it.

Answer 1

The gesture recognizers for tap and long tap work well with each other to short this out (The tap defers firing until its sure its not a long press).

    class ViewController: UIViewController{

        @IBOutlet weak var button: UIButton!
        override func viewDidLoad() {
            super.viewDidLoad()
            button.addGestureRecognizer(UITapGestureRecognizer(target: self, action: #selector(tap)))
            let longPressGestureRecognizer = UILongPressGestureRecognizer(target: self, action: #selector(longPress))
            longPressGestureRecognizer.minimumPressDuration = 1
            button.addGestureRecognizer(longPressGestureRecognizer)
        }

        @objc private func tap(tapGestureRecognizer: UITapGestureRecognizer) {
            print("tap")
        }
        @objc private func longPress (longPressGestureRecognizer: UILongPressGestureRecognizer) {
            if longPressGestureRecognizer.state == .began {
                print("long press began")
            }

        }
    }

Answer 2

You can use UILongPressGestureRecognizer for record video and @IBAction - Touch Up Inside for take photo function.

Step 1: In the storyboard, create an UIButton and drag UILongPressGestureRecognizer from Object libray into this button

Step 2: In the ViewController.swift, we have this code:

import UIKit

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    @IBOutlet weak var label: UILabel!
    @IBOutlet weak var button: UIButton!

    @IBAction func takePhoto(_ sender: AnyObject) {
        label.text = "Take photo"
    }

    @IBAction func recordVideo(_ sender: AnyObject) {
        label.text = "Record video"
    }
}

Step 3: Open Assistant editor and connect these @IBOutlet and @IBAction

That's it!