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Programming

JavaScriptCore and Swift

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JavaScriptCore and Swift

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.

Xcode New File Templates

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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.

Using NSMeasurement For Working with Dimensions and Units

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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.

Using CoreLocation With SwiftUI

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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.

Multithreading Options on Apple Platforms

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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.

OptionSet in Swift

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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.

The "ExpressibleBy-" Protocols in Swift

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Swift gives us many interesting features to write cleaner and more obvious code. This code is more readable, and it helps both SDK consumers and code maintainers.

One such feature Swift has is the ExpressibleBy- family of protocols. This is a set of protocols that allow you to instantiate objects by providing some native Swift object. For example, we can instantiate an object providing a Boolean, or a String.

This family of protocols consist of the following protocols (this is not a complete list):

Getting Started with the App Store Connect API

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In 2018, Apple introduced the App Store Connect API. We as iOS developers interact with App Store Connect almost daily. We like to see our sales reports, analytics, check how our apps are doing. Occasionally, we may need to register a new device or manage our users.

Many of these tasks are so common that it was necessary to get an App Store Connect API at some point. Having an API allows us to automatize some aspects of our day to day tasks on App Store Connect, and to make some tasks easier and faster. In this article, we will explore a few features of the App Store Connect API.

Understanding the Limited Photo Library in iOS 14

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This year, Apple introduced a new feature that gives users even more control over what photos may third party apps see when they see a Photo Picker. The system will first present an alert asking users if they want to give access to their photos at all, and they have the option to give access to all their photos, or only to the photos they choose.

This is great, but it has been a very confusing experience for both users and developers alike. In this article we will explore this new privacy-focused photo picker and how to make good use of it without compromising too much of either usability and privacy.

Quick Tip: Custom Debug Printing with CustomDebugStringConvertible in Swift

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Printing stuff to the console is a simple but powerful step we can take when debugging our apps. But there are times when we want to print an object and we actually get something entirely different, often also useless.

For example, this commonly happens when working with classes and printing instances of them.

class User {
  let id: Int
  let name: String
  
  init(id: Int, name: String) {
    self.id = id
    self.name = name
  }
}

let andy = User(id: 1, name: "Andy")

print(andy)

In a playground, this will print: