Advanced Swift

A collection of 27 posts

iOS

Using RxSwift to Populate Data on UITableView (iOS and Swift)

It's been a while since I posted. But better late than never. In today's blog post, I am going to write about how to use RxSwift to populate data in UITableView on iOS. RxSwift is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based code by using observable sequences and functional style

Property Wrapper

How to Use Property Wrappers in Swift

Swift 5.1 introduced a concept of property wrapper. Property wrappers is a mechanism that allows developers to centralize code for modifying the variable properties during setting and getting their values. For example, as soon as the variable is set, you might want to apply some changes to its property

Advanced Swift

How to Apply Global Styling in SwiftUI Apps

Although not strictly required, it's good to have a basic understanding of creating custom Environment Keys in SwiftUI. If you haven't already read it, I strongly recommend you to go through my previous blog article about creating a custom environment key-value pair in SwiftUI so that you will get more

Advanced Swift

How to Use Actors on iOS to Achieve Thread Safety

Apple introduced the concept of Actors in iOS 13.0 and macOS 10.15. Actors allow us to modify the program state in a concurrent environment without data races and the possibility of corrupting data due to simultaneous access. Data races happen when two threads access the same data and

iOS

iOS - Convert Array to String and String to Array in Swift

Some of the most frequent operations in iOS involve converting an array to a string and string back to an array. This happens when the user has an array of objects but needs to convert them into the user-facing message, or a long string separated by a fixed delimiter needs

Network

Building a Reliable and Testable Networking Stack on iOS

💡This is the first article in my networking series where I am teaching how to build and test a reliable network stack. In the second and final article, I have written about How to Write Comprehensive and Robust Unit Tests for your Network Stack if you want to give it

iOS

How to Measure and Compare Execution Time in Swift and iOS

When you're developing an app, writing it for low-end devices with high network latency makes sure your app does not provide a degraded performance for some users. In order to know how performant our app is, we can add support to provide a timing summary in terms of execution time

AttributedString

SwiftUI Attributed Strings - Decoding and Applying Custom Remote Attributes with Markdown and Attribute Keys

💡This is the next part of my previously published blog post on Attributed strings in iOS 15 - SwiftUI - Attributed Strings Improvements in iOS 15. The first post explains concepts that are needed to understand this post in detail. If you haven't read the previous post yet, I strongly

Asynchronous

AsyncSequence in Swift

Apple introduced the AsyncSequence in Swift 5.5. This is one of the major features released in this Swift version to improve the Swift concurrency. In today's post, we are going to take a look at what AsyncSequence are and how you can make your own custom async sequence in

Combine

Building a Network Service in Swift Using the Combine Framework

Hello readers! Welcome to another blog post. Today we are going to see how to build a generic network service using Apple's Combine framework. Making network calls from the app is the bread and butter of any standard iOS application. Today, we will see how to build a network service

navigation

Cheatsheet for SwiftUI Navigation

How navigation works in SwiftUI often proves to be confusing for new folks. In spite of the apparent attempt by Apple engineers to make app development easier for developers, navigation is one area that is confusing, counterintuitive, and difficult to handle in SwiftUI. In this blog post, I am going

SwiftUI

Extending SwiftUI views beyond the safe area

iOS offers a safe area at the top and bottom of the screen. This safe area prevents content from touching notches present and helps developers place their views within the visible portion of the overall interface. However, there are cases when we want to extend beyond this safe area. For

async-await

Wrapping Existing Async and Closure Based code in async-await structure (Advanced Swift Topic)

If you haven't yet read couple of my posts that introduce a new async-await construct in Swift, below are the links you can follow to know more about it How to use async/await in Swift using ExamplesUsing async/await APIs in Swift 5.5. Examples of using async await

low level debugging

Low-level Debugging on iOS using lldb

WWDC16 Session 417 offered a lot of insight into low-level iOS app debugging applicable for both Objective-C and Swift codebase. In this blog post, we will go over some of the improvements offered by new lldb features and see how you can use them for your own personal or work-related

web socket

How to use WebSockets on iOS using Swift

From Wikipedia, WebSocket is a computer communications protocol, providing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection. Although very useful on Web using JavaScript, we don't use it a lot on iOS platform. From MDN, The WebSocket API is an advanced technology that makes it possible to open a two-way

Swift 3.0

A nice little optimization trick for Swift arrays

Swift arrays are value types that allow dynamically storing the arbitrary numbers of values without knowing the exact count at the beginning. Although this is great when you don't know the exact number of elements you're going to store in advance, you can use a nice optimization technique when you

iOS

[iOS][Swift] Adding timer on reusable UITableViewCells

A few months ago I started the job search and in my very first take-home assignment, I was asked to implement a feature to display timer on UITableViewCell. The use-case was we were going to fetch Bitcoin prices every 60 seconds and the cell would display how long it is

UITableView

Best practices for configuring the table view cells on iOS with Swift

Many times, iOS developers utilize UITableView and UITableViewCell subclasses and sometimes UICollectionView variants to create beautiful views. But it could be tricky when you're writing it for the first time. It's important to know the best practices on how to configure these cells. In this post, I am going to

Async

Async / Await in Swift

Apple introduced the concept of async/await in Swift 5.5 and announced it in the WWDC21 session. Today, we are going to see it in action and how you can leverage it to write readable async code in your app. Please note that async/await is only available in

ARC

Deep dive into Swift memory management with ARC

It's been a while since my last post. For past few months I was busy with work, personal life and lot of things happening outside it so couldn't really commit to writing another article. However, I am back now and going to write about Swift and its memory management quirks.

NSNotifications

Implementing custom NotificationCenter in Swift

NSNotificationCenter is a classic API on iOS. It's used so that classes can register for notifications by name and execute the function/block whenever the notification with same name is fired somewhere else in the project. Today, we will see how to implement NSNotificationCenter API in Swift from scratch. Here

UICollectionView

Tutorial - Creating Programmatic UICollectionView in Swift

Creating a UICollectionView could be stressful - As compared to dealing with UITableView. But things don't have to be this way for so long. Every time I have to add a CollectionView in the app, I end up spending long time trying to figure out what did I do last

UITableView

How to add HeaderView and FooterView to UITableView

Recently I was playing with support to add header and footer view to UITableView. However, task wasn't as easy as adding UITableViewCells to the table view. Header and Footer views acts slightly different than regular table view cells. Today we are going to see how to add self-sizing (self-sizing is

Minesweeper

Rewriting a Minesweeper - Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of the Minesweeper game. Today we will see logic behind some of the core and bonus features in the game. Highlighting tiles Tiles highlighting is triggered when user taps on one of the tiles which is not mine. This triggers a sort of chain reaction to

Minesweeper

Rewriting a Minesweeper - Part 2

Happy new year to all. I guess as I am getting old, I am not feeling enthusiastic enough about new years. There is one thing I am excited about though. Writing a rewriting Minesweeper game in Swift. Yesterday was quite a productive day in terms of my progress. Here's the