We have all worked with strings before. Printing a piece of text, or displaying some information to users in a label, can all be done in strings. But regardless of how popular strings are, they actually have a lot of complex or unknown functionality that can help developers, but they struggle to see the light of day.
In this article, we will explore a very interesting aspect of strings in Swift: Raw Strings, what they are, and how they can be helpful to your every day job.
Regardless how you feel about JavaScript as a programming language, there is one simple fact: JavaScript is pretty ubiquitous, and its uses have expanded beyond web scripting. It has become a pretty popular language for a vast array of domains. For this reason, making languages interoperate with it is pretty important, and both Swift and Objective-C are no exception. We can work with JavaScript, not only by executing JavaScript code directly from our Swift code, but we can even expose code from Swift and Objective-C to JavaScript. That’s how important this language is, and these features open a world of possibilities.
As you work on projects, you may notice that there’s one thing that can be really improved: Creating new files. Every single developer has gone to the File > New File screen on Xcode to create files before. Whether to create new view controllers, data models, or whatever else, it is one of the most common places you may use in your day to day life as an iOS developers.
Software development can be an easy thing, as it can be a very complex thing. And one of those complex things is keeping in mind all the different languages, locations, and standards users may use in their daily lives. This makes working with certain information. From different date formats to entirely different measuring system, software is challenging, especially when working with anything that requires localization. The situation is just so bad that a lot of software just make assumptions about their users environment and don’t let you change any settings.
SwiftUI forces us to change our way of thinking when building iOS apps. It makes us change from writing our apps in MVC to MVVM.
In this article, we will explore how SwiftUI can be used with certain frameworks that aren’t “SwiftUI ready”. While this article uses CoreLocation as an example, keep in mind that you can use what you learn from this to integrate almost any other framework with SwiftUI, whether it is provided by Apple or not.
Every iOS developer has used the simulator. Alongside Xcode, it’s probably one of the most used tool by us all. We use the simulator to test our iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS apps without having to run them in an iOS device.
But other than helping us test our apps, the simulator actually has many nice features that can help make our job a little bit easier. With the use of these features we can avoid using physical devices until it’s time to do an actual test run or one.
A few weeks ago, I sold and transferred my app, Next Anime Episode, to another developer.
In this article, I will discuss the reasons I transferred my app, and what I learned along the way in the process of transferring it.
Why I Sold My App
As a developer who works a full time job and work on indie apps as a hobby, there are many ideas I want to work on. Having apps on the App Store is actually a really big responsibility. You have to maintain it and add features at least every so often to it in order to keep interested. If the app becomes popular enough, the pressure just grows, because you have to start dealing with negative reviews of all kinds. Sometimes justified, sometimes people don’t understand the purpose of your app, sometimes they just insult it and give no feedback whatsoever to improve it.
We have reached the point in which computers are really fast. Especially Apple’s, as they have control of both the hardware and software, so, oftentimes, some tasks that could be sped up with multithreading, are not necessary anymore. But, for those cases when you do need multithreading, we have many options available.
On Apple’s platforms there is a surprising amount of concurrency tools. You are likely familiar with the most used one, the Grand Central Dispatch, DispatchQueue, which is pretty good and it covers the vast majority of use cases. But there are some tasks that can be done easier with other tools.
Creating configurable APIs for other developers can be a fun task. But depending on what languages and tools you are using, you may sometimes create customizable APIs that are more pleasant than others.
In today’s article, we will explore a tiny feature in Swift that allows us to create configurable APIs easily that are a joy to use by other developers: OptionSet.
Introducing OptionSet
Like its name implies, an OptionSet gives us a group of options. These options are pre-defined for our users, and when create an OptionSet, our users are constrained to using the values we are providing within.
Intercepting iOS Network Request Calls with Proxyman
Working with network APIs can be tricky, especially when debugging. You oftentimes have to ask yourself if your app is sending and receiving the expected information. You also often worry about whether the web service returns whatever it promises it will return. Working with APIs is both easy and tricky due to all the implications behind the scenes. What happens if the service goes down and sends unexpected responses? Or if your app loses internet connection? Using a proxy to intercept network calls will help us answer these questions.
