Tips - Fresh Beginning

Tips

A collection of 70 posts

Building a Network Service in Swift Using the Combine Framework

Building a Network Service in Swift Using the Combine Framework

Hello readers! Welcome to another blog post. Today we are going to see how to build a generic network service using Apple's Combine framework [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/combine]. Making network calls from the app is the bread and butter of any standard iOS application. Today, we will see

Useful Travel tips from my experience

Useful Travel tips from my experience

I have been traveling quite a bit recently. It's generally for tech conferences, business visit, or visiting a family overseas. After all the travel in last 8 years I have learned so many things and want to put them together in this blog post. Most of them are related to

Playing audio file on iOS in Swift 4

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,

Random Xcode Trick

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

Using Swift variables in Objective-C : Swift 4 Edition

Today I ran into weird problem which prompted me to write this blog post on Objective-C and Swift interconnectedness. Before Swift 4 came along, the sure way to access Swift variables in Objective-C was to inherit class from NSObject (Swift structs cannot be used in the Objective-C) and prefix it

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

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.

Swift and Objective-C Interaction

Swift and Objective-C Interaction

In this post I am going to write how you can use Swift code in Objective-C and vice versa. I have run into this problem multiple times and every time I hit the wall. More importantly this post acts as a self reference to myself so that I can save

How to use @available attribute in Swift

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

What is @autoclosure in Swift?

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

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 [https://developer.apple.com/ios/3d-touch/]. I wrote a sample project demonstrating the use of

How to live edit any webpage

How to live edit any webpage

I learned this trick to edit any web page on the fly long time ago. It was fun in the beginning and good technique to prank friends. With this technique when you type a single command in the Chrome debugger, it lets you edit any part of webpage as if

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

Using Global .gitignore on Mac

Using Global .gitignore on Mac

If you're a Git user, there is high chance you might be using .gitignore [https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore] file to ignore certain files from being committed into your remote repo. Now, .gitignore file differs [https://gist.github.com/octocat/9257657] for different languages, frameworks and packages. If you have

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

Beauty of Swift

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

Making a crater in UIView with CALayer

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 [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16512761/calayer-with-transparent-hole-in-it] . Although seemingly innocuous, it took me a while to figure out given the view, how to puncture any shape into it. To make it

try-catch blocks - Swift 3.0

try-catch blocks - Swift 3.0

Today, I will try to go through some of the error handling techniques Swift uses. As we all know, the standard way to report error in Objective-C is passing an error pointer such as this NSError *error = nil; // Edit - Thanks to @powerje for correction below // Let's assume you have

JavaScript Closures Fun

JavaScript closures are fun. Not just because they're are sometimes hard to understand, but they make interview questions interesting to tackle. Today I am going to write about one such JavaScript interview question involving nested closures. You may probably find it easy to reason about once solution is presented, but

Tail Recursion Optimization

Recently I came to know about amazing concept of tail recursion optimization. If you are a computer scientist, you must be knowing what recursion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion_(computer_science)] is. It is a function calling itself multiple times until certain edge condition is reached. When an edge

Running UI tests from command line

Recently I ran into an interesting problem of writing UI tests. More interesting thing lied ahead when I had to run these tests on the command line. Here are some of the tips and tricks on how to run your UI tests through command line with variable options. If the

Removing padding for UITextView

Last week I was working on one of the projects that required using UITextView instead of more standard UILabel instance. Don't get me wrong, but there were some compelling reasons for me to use UITextView. The reason being, I wanted to add a clickable link to the text and when

Swift testing with protocols

In this post, we shall see how protocols work with unit testing. Say, you have a downloader class DownloadFileClass for fetching network data. It follows the protocol DownloadFileProtocol. The whole class and protocol looks like this. protocol DownloadFileProtocol { func downloadFile(with name: String, completion: (String) -> ()) } class DownloadFileClass { var downloadedFile:

Search and Replace in Xcode with Regular Expressions

Recently I ran into a problem where I wanted to search for a pattern in the Xcode project and replace the found string with another one. In the past, I had had a hard time dealing with Regular expressions. This time I decided I was going to learn more about

Using Phantom Types in Swift

Phantom types are special types in Swift. They are useful when you want to pass the variable with same structure but with different types. I would like to thank to This blog post [https://angelovillegas.com/swift-phantom-types/] for inspiring me to write this post. Also examples mentioned in the post