Xcode

An App Icon Generator generates all required app icon sizes based on a single-size icon input file. Creating and dragging all those app icons into Xcode is often tiresome since we've all asked ourselves: "Why can't Xcode just generate the sizes for us based on a single file?" Well, there's ...

The Thread Sanitizer, also known as TSan, is an LLVM based tool to audit threading issues in your Swift and C language written code. It was first introduced in Xcode 8 and can be a great tool to find less visible bugs in your code, like data races. At WeTransfer, ...

Development Assets in Xcode allow you to provide test data to use within SwiftUI previews and other code during development. Assets marked for development will only be included in debug builds and removed once you create an archive of your app. Without being aware of development assets, you might have ...

Xcode Mark Lines allows us to create a better overview of sections within our classes or structs. A so-called mark comment adds both a chapter title and linebreak in the Xcode method navigator. This chapter split makes it easier to quickly navigate through a relative big object. Even-though this technique ...

UserDefaults within apps are used to store data related to user configurations. It's an easily accessible data store for saving states, statistics, and other app-related data. Launch arguments are passed to the application on launch and can be used to alter the application for debugging purposes. It's often used by ...

Launch screens appear when your app starts up and give the user the impression that your app is fast and responsive. After your app is loaded it will be replaced with your app's first screen after which the user can start using your app. Xcode creates a storyboard by default ...

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 ...

SwiftUI Previews allow us to develop a lot faster as we can now preview our views live in Xcode. Whenever we change a piece of code, our preview will update and show the rendered change accordingly. While developing a view that has to change into different appearances for certain states ...

Dark Mode was introduced in iOS 13 and announced at WWDC 2019. It adds a darker theme to iOS and allows you to do the same for your app. It's a great addition to give to your users so they can experience your app in a darker design. In this ...

Xcode 11 was introduced during WWDC 2019 and contained improvements in the way the assistant editor works. If you're using a second editor a lot it can be quite frustrating at first when you try to use the same workflow in Xcode 11 when files are opened in the left ...

Xcode breakpoints allow us to debug and find out solutions for nasty bugs. Without breakpoints, it would be a fun fest with a lot of print statements everywhere in your code. The basic principles of breakpoints we probably all know but there's a lot more to discover! What are breakpoints ...

Xcode Instruments is a developer tool that comes for free with Xcode. It has a lot of useful tools to inspect and improve your app. Although it has a lot to offer, it's often an area which is a bit less known. In this blog post, I'll show you how ...