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.
Happy New Years everyone! To kick off this year, I wanted to write a non-technical article. This time I want to focus on a topic that you won’t find in many other places, and that is what it is like to hunt for iOS jobs in Bolivia, and what my experience has been like being one here. By the end of this article, you will hopefully understand a very different market compared to countries such as the USA, and you will be able to make a decision on whether this is a field you want to pursue or not. What I’m going to be writing about applies to Bolivia, but keep in mind that South America in general has very similar conditions and markets.
There are times in which you may want to host small JSON (or other small types of files) somewhere because your app needs them. Maybe you want to configure feature flags, or maybe you want to host IAP identifiers somewhere so as to not hardcode them in your app. This last case is something I did recently.
The immediate thought will be get a cheap server somewhere - after all, using something like Vultr you can get cheap hosting for as low as $2.50 per month. But did you know Github allows you to publish static websites, and you can piggyback that on that to store remote “config” about your apps?
If you have been writing Swift in the past couple of years, you have probably been using Codable (which is really just the composition of Decodable and Encodable in the same protocol).
If you have been writing iOS apps for longer, you likely know about JSONSerialization as well, which is the backbone of Codable and it allows you to do more manual work when parsing JSON, seemingly giving you more control.
If you know JSONSerialization, you have probably found times in which Codable seemingly doesn’t give you the flexibility you need, and you may have been tempted to drop Codable in favor of JSONSerialization when parsing very specific or even corrupted JSON.
I had announced that I wouldn’t be able to write an article this week due to it being Elections Day in my country. that said I just can’t leave you guys without article, so this is a short one.
We will write another NSFormatter subclass. It will allow us to compose E-mails easily. This should also help show that formatters can format string into anything else really.
In short, we will be able to “compose” emails using raw strings, like this:
Anilist is the popular website for anime and manga fans, where you can keep track of your favorite series, or discover something new to watch or read.
Silvianna comes packed with power features for list management. The app allows you to modify anything about items on your list as long as it is supported by Anilist.
FEATURES:
Friendly on the smallest iPhone and the biggest iPad.
Keep track of series that are currently airing easily. Series that you haven’t watcheda all the episodes of and are currently airing will have a visible red banner telling you how many episodes behind you are, making it easy to keep track of everything you watch.
When you finish watching a series, you will automatically be prompted for the rating. You no longer need to navigate through different screens if you weren’t able to rate something you watched.
When rating a series, it will use the rating system currently set in your Anilist account. It doesn’t matter if you are using the standard 10 point system, 10 point decimal system, 5-star system, or even the Emoji system - Silvianna supports all the rating systems provided by Anilist.
If your rating system supports Advanced Scoring, Silvianna will grab your parameters and you will be able to also perform advanced scoring according to your custom parameters.
You have access to your Anilist profile, so you can access your Manga and Anime lists easily and quickly.
Multiwindow support on the iPad.
You can search the entire Anilist database for Anime and Manga.
This is just the initial release of Silvianna, and we are excited to make the project grow with your feedback and ideas.
NSFormatter is an abstract class. All formatter classes inherit from it. In Swift, everything we need about it is open, so we can create our own NSFormatters with ease.
Sometimes we may be interested on how well our app is performing out there in the world. After all, our apps may be running in different environments that are hard to test or that Instruments may not catch.
For this purpose, Apple introduced MetricKit back in WWDC2019. MetricKit allows us to aggregate and analyze this benchmark data on a per-device basis, and not only does it include information on performance and battery usage, but also on exceptions and crash reports.
A year ago, we talked about using NSFormatter for formatting data in a human readable format. WWDC2020 brings some updates and changes to the NSFormatter APIs that we need to be aware of. This article will complement the NSFormatter article from last year with best practices and things to look out for.
Improvements for Combinations of Languages and Regions.
NSFormatter always does its best to format the data according to the user’s language and region where relevant. Apple is improving the combinations for this because it’s highly common for people to set their phones in a language that is not commonly used in a given region. This is pretty exciting for me, because I live in Bolivia where people speak Spanish, but I have used my devices in English for as long as I can remember.
Translating our apps in different languages helps us reach wider audiences of different cultures. This reach can increase our app usage considerably and offer more monetization properties.
In this short article we will mention the features Apples gives us to translate our apps to different languages, namely NSLocalizedString and and stringsdict files. You will also understand when you will want to use each, as they have different use cases and an app that takes localization seriously will use both.
