Swift 3.0 - Fresh Beginning

A nice little optimization trick for Swift arrays

Swift arrays are value types that allow dynamically storing the arbitrary numbers of values without knowing the exact count at the beginning. Although this is great when you don't know the exact number of elements you're going to store in advance, you can use a nice optimization technique when you

JSON

Using Codable Protocol in iOS to Decode Complex JSON Objects

A while back, I wrote a blog post about using Codable to encode/decode JSON payload while sending to or receiving from the server. However, I often find myself in situations where having straightforward examples with a single complex JSON is easier to understand how I can use it for

UITableView

Best practices for configuring the table view cells on iOS with Swift

Many times, iOS developers utilize UITableView and UITableViewCell subclasses and sometimes UICollectionView variants to create beautiful views. But it could be tricky when you're writing it for the first time. It's important to know the best practices on how to configure these cells. In this post, I am going to

Sound

Playing audio file on iOS in Swift 4

Playing media file in apps is fun. Media usually puts constraints on system resources, but it is ok to indulge in fun once in a while. In this post we will see how to play audio in the iOS app. Given the high impact of size on the app download,

Xcode 9

Random Xcode Trick

Despite my regular rantings on Xcode and Apple software, I still love them. In past few years, I have used so many IDEs and trust me, Xcode is one of the best I have seen. However, it has its bad times and tantrums - But it is understandable with its

Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions in Swift and iOS

I didn't actually plan on writing this post. However, things didn't go as I expected them to go. Today I was helping someone with Regular Expression which I thought was my forte and it still failed me. The regular expression exercise which I was arrogant about finishing in 10 minutes

Swift 3.0

Functional magic with Swift

Last few days I have been experimenting with functional magic in Swift. Especially how map and flatMaps work. I was so amazed to know how hassle-free my life became after I understood and harnessed the power of functional magic in Swift. I strongly encourage you to do so as well.

UIKit

Using Autolayout to Dynamically Resize UILabel

We all love Autolayout, don't we? I had a less than ideal experience with it when I started. However, after continuous practice and reading a Book - iOS Auto Layout Demystified I got more comfortable with it. However, there are certain cases where it's still possible to solve problem with

iOS

Writing an app with VIPER architecture - Part 2

I have written a part 1 of writing an iOS app using VIPER architecture. This covers fundamentals and basic example of using VIPER, creating models, entities and utilizing them in the app. This is the second and final part in the series. This will be very much similar to the

MVVM

Comparing VIPER vs. MVVM

Recently I started playing with VIPER architecture. Although I was quite hesitant trying it out, it turns out it's not all that bad as I expected. It'e certainly better than traditional MVC iOS architecture in terms of testability and separation of concerns. However, I found it consistently annoying to have

Touch

Touch ID Authentication in the app

Today I am going to write about implementing and using Touch ID authentication in an iOS app. Touch ID authentication API was introduced in iOS 8 release. It is a part of LocalAuthentication framework. The code to include it in your app spans only few lines and easy to integrate.

Core Data

Core Data Migration - Part 2 (Removing Attributes)

Disclaimer: I have taken a code example to show how to migrate data from Migrating a data model with Core data. So if you are interested in learning more about core data, please read on the original post In the last post of core data migration series we saw how

Objective-C

How to use @available attribute in Swift

Today I am going to write about attributes that Swift offers. Attribute is nothing but the construct which provides more information about declaration or type. As long as this blog post is concerned, I am going to keep the content specific to Declaration Attributes. Attributes can be specified with @ symbol

Swift 3.0

Swift 3.0 - What is as, as? and as! operators?

We all have been there where language offers plethora of options. However, I have quite experienced that bunch of features sometimes cause confusion even though individual feature is easier to understand. When all the features come at once, it gets quite scary to remember what goes where. In this post

Swift 3.0

What is @autoclosure in Swift?

It's on very rare or never occasion that I have ever used a @autoclosure keyword while passing a closure to method - A closure which takes no parameter and returns a value (No value type) back. In this post I will try to decipher the hazy definition of @autoclosure that

iOS

List of Interview Questions for iOS Developers

Over the years of iOS development has taught me some interesting facts about Objective-C and Swift. Some of them I learned from my own experience and most of them either from senior colleagues or other online resources (Attributions added to the end). Based on this knowledge I have compiled a

Speech Recognition

Wrapper for Siri Speech Recognition using iOS and Swift 3.0

Apple introduced the Speech framework, an useful API for speech recognition for iOS 10 in 2016. It is one of the few things to get fascinated by the new iOS release. Earlier I saw this amazing video on Realm blog. It was the source of main motivation for writing this

iOS

Wrapper for 3D touch preview implementation using Swift 3.0

It's been a while since I started working on 3D touch implementation on iOS 6s Plus devices. Luckily, even through it's a hardware feature iOS simulators still supports simulation of 3D touch of supported devices. I wrote a sample project demonstrating the use of 3D touch along with blog post

iOS

iOS - Communication from Javascript to iOS

This is the second part of two series article. You have already read the first part which shows how to transfer data from iOS to JavaScript. In this part we will see how you can transfer data from JavaScript function back to iOS (Swift). For the clarity purpose and to

JavaScript

iOS - Communication from iOS to JavaScript

This is the first part of a series about communication between iOS and JavaScript. In this part we will see How to call JavaScript functions from iOS How to get return value of executed JavaScript functions back to iOS How to pass variety of objects types (String, object) to JavaScript

Apple

Indirect enums - Swift 3.0

Enums are one of my favorite parts in any language. With Swift they've got extra functionality such as adding functions, associated values and Indirect Enums. So what are indirect enums? I have learned enums in other language, but never came across any language which offers similar functionality. At least not

Swift 3.0

Equality and Comparison with custom objects in Swift (Equatable protocol)

Few weeks ago I ran into frustrating problem. I was dealing with custom objects in Swift. (Actually struct with properties). They were being stored in an array. Now, this array was going to undergo frequent activity due to user action such as adding new elements and avoiding duplicates. So while

Swift 3.0

Beauty of Swift

Today I am going to talk about couple of Swift tricks I learned recently. First one is about operator associativity and how Swift handles it gracefully to error it out during compile time and other is how function overloading is so much fun in Swift Operator Associativity We all know

iOS

Creating Custom Operators in Swift with Generics

Swift introduced us to a new era of custom operators. Unlike Objective-C, it allows us to define our own operators and perform operator overloading on existing operators if necessary. We will see both of them in detail in today's article. Custom operators can provide excellent clarity and flexibility down the

iOS

Making a crater in UIView with CALayer

Although title sounds horrible, believe me - It's not that bad. This is a trick I learned from StackOverflow post. Although seemingly innocuous, it took me a while to figure out given the view, how to puncture any shape into it. To make it more interesting let's not only add