Effective development can be achieved by learning more skills, but also by improving the daily routine for you as a developer. Creating consistency in your daily flow will bring efficiency and higher productivity. Close your mail app for example at 10 AM and see what it does. Do you really have to answer incoming emails …
Compiler Diagnostic Directives using a hashtag in Swift
The Swift standard library brings quite some compiler diagnostic directives by default. Although this might not ring a bell at all, a lot of them are quite known and listed in the Swift repository. Warning Warning can be used to manually trigger a warning on the given line. This can be useful during development to …
Where usage in Swift
Where is a powerful keyword within Swift to easily filter out values. It can be used in many different variants from which most of them are listed in this post. Usage in a switch Consider having the following enum: Using where you can easily filter the case for a specific age range: Usage in a …
Debugging breakpoints as a replacement for prints
Debugging breakpoints in Xcode allows you to replace prints and reuse debugging statements in future debugging sessions. By simply enabling and disabling needed breakpoints you can also get rid of debug levels as often defined in libraries like CocoaLumberjack. Inspired by @twostraws’s debugging presentation at @AppdevconNL I now keep around breakpoints instead of print …
Typed notifications using custom extensions
The Swift API contains a lot of notifications sent out by the system like NSManagedObjectContextObjectsDidChange in Core Data or the AppDelegate events like UIApplicationDidBecomeActive. Some of these notifications contain rich data in their user info dictionary. Reading the user info data using typed notifications can clean up your code, especially if you use these notifications …
Core Data Debugging in Xcode using launch arguments
Core Data is Apple’s object graph management and persistency framework for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It’s around for a long time and therefore a great solution to use for persistent storage of structured data in your application. Core Data Debugging might be a bit hard, although some less-known functionalities in Xcode can help you …
Using Xcode custom file templates with GIT
Xcode custom file templates are a great way to develop just a bit faster and enable you to define a base template with all repetitive work included. Combining it with GIT enables you to share these files in your team and let them benefit as well. Creating a GIT repository for Xcode custom file templates …
Useful less known Xcode tips to improve your workflow
Xcode is the main IDE for developing software for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It contains a lot of well-known features like Open Quickly (⇧ + ⌘ + O), the assistant editor and handy shortcuts like ⌘ + U to run tests quickly. Some other features are less known but just as useful and these …
App Store Optimization for your App Store Page
App Store Optimization can help people discover your app on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. With some useful tips, you can easily optimize yours. During a WWDC App Store lab feedback session, I’ve gathered some really useful tips on our WeTransfer app. Title, subtitle and promotional text These are one of the most …
Enabling newly added opt-in features in Xcode 10
During WWDC 2018 Apple announced Xcode 10 with a lot of new features. Many of them are available for you automatically and enabled by default, but some of them might not show up and need some manual adjustments. Code folding To enable it, open preferences under Text Editing > Editing and select Code folding ribbon. …