Workflow

Designing apps can be challenging if you don't have a design background. Many of you who read my blog are great at writing code, but making that perfect design is a different challenge. For my From Side Project to Going Indie Course, I invited my good friend Hidde van der ...

Test-driven development (TDD) is a technique that requires you first to write a failing test before you start implementing a solution. While it's a technique developers use during general development, there's a way to apply it only for bug fixes. Finding out about a bug can already be disappointing, but ...

Third-party libraries help developers build apps faster but often come with a license. The MIT license is likely the most common, but there are many others that, together, require you to acknowledge the usage of the library in return for getting free access. I'm not going to dive deep into ...

App Preview Videos allow you to increase the visibility of your app in the App Store. While it's best to validate whether it leads to higher conversions, it's certain a moving demo will catch the attention quicker. Creating a qualitative App Preview Video can be time-consuming, especially since Apple has ...

Status bar overrides in the iOS Simulator allow you to change the appearance of the network, cellular, time, and battery. You can use this feature to beautify your screenshots and ensure a consistent appearance across, for example, your App Store screenshots. While functionality for overriding the iOS status bar has ...

When a new iOS version arrives, it's oftentimes a moment to reflect on the supported iOS versions and see to which minimum iOS version your project should be set. It's an important decision in a developer's job and not something you can do without reasoning. We can be fortunate with ...

OSLog is a replacement for print, and NSLog and Apple's recommended way of logging. It has different logging levels, like debugging, warning, and error logs. Altogether, it allows you to create an enriched logging experience fitting nicely in Xcode 15's new logging console. OSLog has a low-performance overhead and is ...

Location Simulation is a critical feature for apps that provide location access. You want to mimic the environment of real users without stepping in your car and driving a route while debugging. Whether you want to simulate switching directly between two places or an entire route of waypoints: both are ...

Testing push notifications in the iOS simulator make adding support for remote notifications much more effortless. You often must iterate a lot to verify that your code is working as expected. After gaining permission to receive push notifications in your app, you can start testing out several notifications. Xcode's Simulator ...

It's common to have a side project as an engineer since we can build our ideas. At the same time, it's also trending to start a new project before you've finished the previous one. You could say there's a graveyard of many side projects that didn't reach the public. While ...

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, ...