ios
What I Look for When Refactoring
The Backstory My current assignment is working on a rather large app that had a huge summer push that involved scaling the team up to several developers per platform and the addition of a handful of third-party libraries. As anyone who has worked in iOS development will tell you, the App Delegate is often the …
How to Get Started With Pods
Pods, also known as CocoaPods, are a necessary evil. And they are ubiquitous. Even if you’ve never used them, you probably know that they exist, and you may even have a general sense of what they are, because questions about them come up on Stack Overflow all the time. Basically, Pods are code libraries that …
Get Started With Swift Packages
Encapsulating code so that you can share it between your own projects and with other programmers has always been a bit tricky in Xcode. You can write a framework easily enough, but sharing frameworks between apps is not simple, and it’s even harder to distribute your code to others as a framework, and for others …
Xcode Tip of the Day: Where Am I?
As soon as your app grows to more than a few view controllers, you can easily find yourself looking at code in Xcode’s code editor without a clear idea of where that code lives in your project as a whole. You know what code you are looking at, because the jump bar at the top …
The Joys of Logging
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of what I call “caveman” debugging, also known as logging. Real debugging involves breakpoints, stepping, examining the call stack, looking at variables, talking to LLDB; it’s powerful stuff, and should be part of every Xcode programmer’s toolbox. But sometimes the simplest way is to drop yourself a …
Cool Swift Tricks 2: No Escape
This is the second of four posts about random little Swiftisms for you to amaze your friends and confound your enemies. All of these came up in my real code recently, and they really did surprise one or more of my co-workers. The Swift language has a lot of cool features hidden away in its …
Cool Swift Tricks 1: Mirror, Mirror
This is the first of four posts about random little Swift tips and tricks for you to amaze your friends and confound your enemies. All of these came up in my real code recently, and they really did surprise one or more of my co-workers. The Swift language has a lot of cool features hidden …
WWDC20: What’s New in Apple’s iOS 14
If we’re honest, we were a little worried that the very first, virtual WWDC would lose something of the excitement we’ve come to expect from years past. The steady hum of anticipatory chatter through the crowd; the warm glow of a thousand laptop screens a half-brightness in readiness for the first speaker — we thought …
