General

Swift 3 conversion and refactoring your project

A few weeks ago Apple announced the deprecation of Swift 2.3 starting with the release of Xcode 8.2. Reason enough to start the Swift 3 conversion of the Videoland iOS app. As the project contains many files, this couldn’t be less than challenging. The project was setup in the end of 2014, starting in Swift … →

 

ALLocalizables: Localization using interface builder

ALLocalizables makes it possible to localize uilabels and uibuttons directly through the Interface Builder using a new available property ‘Localize string’. I already posted about this framework in my recent post UIStoryboards, IBDesignables and localization, but now it’s fully supported for UILabels, UIButtons and available through CocoaPods. Check it out, it’s easy to use and … →

 

Apple forcing users to update iOS more quickly

Yesterday Apple announced a lot in their Keynote and gave us some more detailes in “The State Of The Union” session. One of the things come by quickly was updating to a new version of iOS. This is normally an optional update, but from now on it seems to be no option anymore. Good news … →

 

iOS 9, OSX El Capitan and Swift 2.0

Today Apple announced a bunch of new features and made us developers really happy. We’ve got a lot to explore, to try out and see whats possible with the latest API’s. My first WWDC and first Keynote experience were great. Entering the queue at 6am was early enough to get a nice spot in the … →

 

ReactiveCocoa and Swift

Last November I started converting the Videoland project into a Swift only project. I planned to totally redesign the application and implement a new way of networking. In Objective-C I was mainly using block based methods in combination with our own network library TIFNetworking, based on AFNetworking. It was a combination of AFNetworking, linking together … →

 

if, let, let, where statements

Swift 1.2 came with new possibilities for if statements. One big improvement is using multiple lets in one if statement, using the first let declaration in the second: if let car = createCar(), let color = car.color { if color == UIColor.redColor() { } } Even better is combing it with where: if let car … →

 

Swift method parameters, coffee, sugar & milk

Swift methods are quite different comparing to Objective-C methods. It comes with many possibilities for method parameters, which makes it sometimes a bit hard to understand whats happening. In some cases methods aren’t even readable enough in my opinion. Swift comes with the possibility to add # and _ inside method declaration. The hash enforces … →

 

#warning, we’ve lost #pragma mark

Swift introduced cool stuff, but also removed some essentials. For example, checking the #warning tags before submitting helped us prevent submitting an app with the test environment enabled. In Swift, there’s no more #warning and #pragma mark tag. There is instead a new way to create a #pragma mark using the following syntax: // MARK: … →

 

UIStoryboards, IBDesignable and localization

One of the important parts in building apps is localization. It’s something we developers mostly postpone till the end of the development process. Making this process easier would make it more accessible to do it more constantly during the project, which can be done using IBDesignable and IBInspectable properties. Xcode 6 introduced these properties, which … →