Category Archives: iOS

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November 1, 2017

Computed Properties vs Functions – Why Does It Matter?

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Cookies

What’s your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe? I bet you could ask that question to 5 different people and get 5 totally different recipes… brown sugar vs white sugar, cake flour vs all purpose, dark chocolate vs milk chocolate. All of these recipes result in a chocolate chip cookie but the process by which we get there is a matter of personal preference.  If you were to ask multiple developers to solve a problem, it’s doubtful that any two developers write identical code.  It’s not that any one solution is necessarily better than the others… the resulting code is likely just a matter of personal preference.

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October 16, 2017

Preventing Bloated View Controllers with Coordinators in iOS

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A cartoon image depicting a coordinator pattern.

Overstuffed View Controllers: a problem that is universally despised by iOS developers the world over. Who hasn’t had their eyes glaze over while staring down debugging a 3000 line VC? View Controllers can control so much information, and Apple seems to have very few opinions on where specific logic should go. They give us the decision making power. How can we prevent against this annoying problem and modularize our apps better? Model–View–View Model (MVVM) can certainly help with this, but ultimately leaves routing to View Controllers, which doesn’t make the most sense. This is where a Coordinator comes in.

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February 12, 2017

REST API Models in Swift

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There are a lot of APIs out there, a lot of networking layers, a lot of abstractions, I’m going to offer just one way to start building Swift models backed by a RESTful API. Out of personal preference, PromiseKit will be used instead of callbacks and ObjectMapper will be used to convert between JSON and Swift objects.

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December 5, 2016

What is Pixel Density and Why Should You Care?

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Pixel density is the number of pixels per linear physical unit. Measured in pixels per inch (ppi or dpi). Pixel density and resolution are technically the same thing, but often people say “resolution” to mean “pixel count,” a related metric:

count = densityH * width * densityV * height

When other things are held constant:

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November 17, 2016

Beacons, iOS and You

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Photo of beacon

What are beacons?

a) A tiny piece of plastic.
b) A low energy bluetooth device.
c) An emerging technology with numerous applications.
d) All of the above.

If you guessed all of the above, you would be correct! Beacons are an IoT technology that is deceptively simple and small but packs a potentially large punch for app developers looking for new and interesting ways to engage their customers.

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November 5, 2016

6 Steps to Improve App Search Rankings

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Working as developers, we are focused on the low level technical details of a product, being that a website or an app. This heads down approach often makes us not to pay attention to many high level details that are crucial to bring our product to success. The typical path for a developer, at least at the beginning, is to build an app, put it on the store and then see it fail miserably. If that has happened to your app, then this post is for you!

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September 21, 2016

Apple Watch Connectivity

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On September 9th, 2014, Tim Cook announced the Apple Watch. This wearable smartwatch quickly gained the loyalty of millions. The wearable was developed in part to incorporate fitness tracking and allow for health tracking, but more-so to free users from their phones. It includes a digital crown used to scroll and zoom, and a touchscreen with Force Touch technology. An extra button under the digital crown serves favorite contacts and access to Apple Pay.

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August 9, 2016

Introduction to React Native

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React Native underlines a JavaScript framework used in writing real and natively rendering mobile applications for Android and iOS. The framework is based on React, which is Facebook’s JavaScript library used in building interfaces for web applications. Building a mobile application using javascript isn’t anything new. The similar technique has been used in frameworks such as Ionic, Sencha Touch, Phone Gap, Cordova, and the list goes on.

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March 1, 2016

Prototyping with Interface Builder

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With the acquisition of Next in 1997, a new tool was initiated into the Apple family. Originally known as an enhancement of OpenStep, called NextStep, it caught the attention of the developer community under the name of Interface Builder, as part of the XCode suite. Now about to celebrate its 20th birthday, Interface Builder represents the most powerful IDE to design user interfaces in a development suite. It doesn’t matter if you are writing an app for iOS, Cocoa, tvOS or watchOS; when carefully used, it will save you hundreds of lines of code. For this and other innumerable reasons, many developers, like myself, love this tool.

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