This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
To better benefit from this article, you should be familiar with async/await. If you aren’t, feel free to read the first part of this article series: Understanding async/await in Swift.
This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
Before you try to dive in with concurrency in Swift, you need to understand async/await. There’s no way around it. While async/await are not the only concurrency options, Apple’s SDKs are starting to make heavy use of them. There is no doubt that third-party library providers will start offering these as well.
This article series was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The articles in the series, code samples, and provided sample projects have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
This is a tutorial series focused on the new async/await APIs Apple introduced in WWDC2021. I do not know how many articles it is going to have yet, but they will be posted in the upcoming weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While CryptoKit still doesn’t offer many algorithms and functionality, it’s still growing, and this year CryptoKit and do more.
HKDF
Key derivation functions have been available from day one, but it wasn’t possible to derive keys independently. It was only possible to do so if you were using elliptic curve key agreement protocols.
To do this, there is a new HKDF object with static methods. One such method is deriveKey with multiple overloads:
