iOS development

A collection of 32 posts

Newsletter

iOS Dev & Swift Newsletter #1

The first month of the year is already over! In the first few weeks, there were already very interesting blog posts and YouTube videos in the world of iOS development and Swift.

How iOS Development Has Evolved Over The Past 8 Years

I’ve been a full-time iOS developer for over 6 years now and I started learning iOS development 8 years ago. A lot has changed over the years. In this post I want to talk about the biggest changes I’ve experienced. Swift Obviously one of the biggest changes in

iOS development

Swift: Use Cases For Guard

The keyword guard has been introduced in Swift 2. It was a little bit inconspicuous at the first sight, but it has a lot of power. In this article we will take a look at three uses cases for guard. Hint: This post has been updated to Swift 3 and

iOS development

Network Link Conditioner

In this post we will discuss how you can simulate a bad network connection by using the Network Link Conditioner. Bad Network Connection iOS apps are running in a very difficult environment. Compared to a desktop computer you have limited memory and CPU resources. And even worse: The network connection

Apple TV

Interview: Natasha The Robot

Natasha The Robot is an iOS development industry leader. She blogs at natashatherobot.com and publishes a weekly Swift newsletter at swiftnews.curated.co. Her Twitter handle is @NatashaTheRobot. Natasha, thanks for taking the time! First of all, what are you up to these days? It’s been the holiday

iOS development

12/15: The Best iOS Development Links

The best iOS development links from December 2015. * Swift.org: Swift is now open source! * Core Data Book: The new Core Data Book by @objcio is now available. Highly recommended! * The OpenSource Experience: So Swift is open source now. But why should you care about it? Why is Open Source

iOS development

Xcode: Groups And Folder References

In Xcode you can add folders as groups or as folder references. So what are the differences between these two? Groups If you drag a folder to the project navigator, the following window appears: If you choose “create groups”, then the corresponding folder appears with a yellow icon in the

iOS development

Swift: Public Properties With Private Setters

In Swift you can easily create public properties with private setters. It makes your code much safer and shorter. Hint: This post has been updated to Swift 3 Encapsulation Encapsulation means basically that information and states of a class should be hidden from outside of the class – only the class

iOS development

Top Ten Most Popular Posts Of 2015

The end of the year is a good time to look back, so I put together a list of the ten most popular posts of 2015. The ranking is based on the number of page views. #1: How To Stay Up-To-Date On iOS Development iOS development is changing very quickly.

iOS development

How To Disable ARC For Objective-C Files

In iOS development you are using ARC almost all of the time. However, sometimes you have to disable ARC for Objective-C files. ARC – Automatic Reference Counting In the early days of iOS development, memory management played a major role. Because a traditional garbage collection was too inefficient for a mobile

iOS development

Swift 3 And Beyond

On December 3, 2015, the Swift language was released as open source. It also involves a roadmap for Swift 3, which will be released in fall 2016. API Design Guidelines And Swift’s Objective-C Importer Swift 3 will have API design guidelines that are different to the Cocoa guidelines for

iOS development

The Pyramid Of Doom In Swift

If you are using a lot of nested indentations, your code becomes rapidly unclear – the pyramid of doom. You can avoid this by using the keyword guard. The Pyramid Of Doom Let’s start by looking at an example. We are creating a function that calculates the area of a

iOS development

11/15: The Best iOS Development Links

The best iOS development links from November 2015. * Thoughts on Functional Programming in Swift: Functional programming has become a highly discussed topic in the iOS developer community. In this article by @NatashaTheRobot you can read some interesting thoughts on this topic. * Mixins over Inheritance: Protocols can help you to write

iOS development

Swift: weak and unowned

With the keywords weak and unowned you can avoid so-called reference cycles. In this post we will discuss the differences between them. References Cycles As I’ve described already in my blog post “A Trick To Discover Retain Cycles”, it is still important to do some kind of memory handling,

iOS development

Should You Specialise In One Platform?

Developers are wondering very often whether they should specialise in one platform or not. In this post we will discuss why specializing is the better choice. The Generalist The generalist is a developer who has knowledge in many different areas. For example, he could have knowledge in iOS, Android and

iOS development

Should You Migrate Objective-C Code To Swift?

The future belongs to Swift, but does this mean that you should migrate Objective-C code to Swift? Option #1:  Don’t Migrate Your Code And Stick To Objective-C On the first sight this is the easiest way. Since you have already a running project written in Objective-C, it will not

iOS development

Swift: map and flatMap

With the functions map and flatMap you can easily transform an array into a new one. Hint: This post has been updated to Swift 3 Map The function map can be called on an array and takes a closure that is called on each element of the array. This closure

iOS development

3 Predictions For The Future Of iOS Development

It is not possible to predict the future – so let’s do it! Swift Is The Future of iOS Development It is very interesting to observe the development of Swift. Apple’s new programming language has just been introduced a year ago, but it is already heavily used and accepted

iOS development

A Trick To Discover Retain Cycles

Although ARC does most of the memory handling work for you, your app can still suffer from so-called retain cycles. So it is very important to discover them. ARC And Memory Handling With the introduction of the Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) in iOS 5, memory handling has became much simpler.

iOS development

What Is The Best Test Device At Development Time?

If you are developing an app, you should not only use the simulator but also a real device. But what is the best test device at development time? Simulator vs. Real Device As I pointed out in my “Simulator vs Real Device” article, it is not a good idea to

iOS development

10/15: The Best iOS Development Links

The best iOS development links in October 2015. * guard & defer: A new article by @NSHipster. This time about “guard” and “defer”, which are two new control statements in Swift 2. * Literals in Playgrounds: Playgrounds are a very powerful tool every iOS developer should use. In this post, Apple describes

iOS development

Swift Tutorial For Beginners: Part 1

Swift is Apple’s new programming language for developing applications for iOS, watchOS, tvOS and Mac OS. In this Swift tutorial you will learn all its basics. What will you learn in this “Swift Tutorial For Beginners”? This Swift tutorial includes the following topics: * Downloading Xcode * Playgrounds * “Hello World!” program

iOS development

The 5 Best WWDC 2015 Talks

Four months ago Apple introduced iOS 9, Swift 2 and many other new things at the WWDC 2015. This is a list of the five best WWDC 2015 talks. Advanced NSOperations If you are dealing with a lot of concurrent code, it can be become very hard to handle the

iOS development

Swift: Using Local Closures

Closures are often used as function arguments. But sometimes there are situations where local closures can be very handy. Hint: This post has been updated to Swift 3, iOS 10 and Xcode 8 Imagine you have a view controller that has two GUI modes: enum GUIMode { case Mode1 case Mode2

iOS development

Five Myths About Swift

Swift is still a very young technology, but there are already a lot of myths about Swift. Myth #1: “Swift has weak typing” Many people think that Swift has weak typing. The reason for that is that you can declare the type for a value implicitly: var i = 5 It