While developing apps it’s important to create focus to get in your flow and speed up development. Full-screen mode can help to keep your focus without any distraction from other apps. Up until Xcode 12 full-screen support was hidden behind a user defaults flag. With the latest version of Xcode, we can now simply make …
SVG Assets in Xcode for Single Scale Images
Xcode 12 introduced support for using Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS. It’s one of those changes that you might have missed during WWDC 2020 as it’s quite a small addition. Up until Xcode 12, we were able to use single scale resources by using PDF assets. It takes away …
WWDC 2020: 7 Tips to prepare yourself
In less than a week we will know what WWDC 2020 has brought to us. Apple has been working hard like every year to deliver a new Xcode, OS versions, and possibly new products. It’s like Christmas in the middle of the year if you’re developing for any of Apple’s platforms. This year is a …
@discardableResult in Swift explained: Ignoring return values
While writing methods in Swift you’re often running into scenarios in which you sometimes want to ignore the return value while in other cases you want to know the return value. The @discardableResult attribute allows us to enable both cases without having to deal with annoying warnings or underscore replacements. It’s a small feature in …
Core Data Performance: 6 tips you should know
Writing Core Data code with performance in mind helps to prepare your app for the future. Your database might be small in the beginning but can easily grow, resulting in slow queries and decreased experience for the user. Since I started writing the Collect by WeTransfer app in 2017 I’ve been writing a lot of …
Introducing GitBuddy: Changelog and Release manager for GitHub
It’s been a few months since we released the initial version of GitBuddy but it’s the right time now to tell you all about our new best friend. We’ve been testing it intensively by making use of it in all our iOS related open-source projects at WeTransfer to create and manage our changelogs and releases. …
Expressible literals in Swift explained by 3 useful examples
Expressible literals allow you to initialize types by making use of literals. There are multiple protocols available in the Swift standard library and chances are big that you’ve already been using one of those. An example is the ExpressibleByStringLiteral allowing us to initialize a String using surrounding double quotes instead of using the String(init:) method. …
String Interpolation in Swift explained using 4 useful cases
Swift 5 introduced a decent version of string interpolation with SE-228 and updated the old version of the ExpressibleByStringInterpolation protocol that has been deprecated since Swift 3. The new version of this protocol allows us to write powerful extensions to existing types that define how objects interact when used within string interpolation. While developing apps …
Using Custom debug descriptions to improve debugging
Custom debug descriptions can help you debug your own custom objects, structs, errors, and other types. Whenever you print out an object you might end up with basic information that doesn’t really help you solve your issue. Printing out a struct shows you all the values while you might only be interested in one of …
URLs in Swift: Common scenarios explained in-depth
URLs are everywhere in an app we built. We reference local files using bundle paths, we fetch data from a path pointing to our API, and we fetch images to display visuals. While working with URLs we often need to verify things like making sure that it’s pointing to a file or that certain query …