Every once in a while I find myself writing about or experimenting with web sockets. As an iOS developer, I’m not terribly familiar with setting up and programming servers that leverage web sockets beyond some toy projects in college. Regardless, I figured that since I have some posts that cover web sockets on my blog, I should show you how I set up the socket servers that I use in those posts. Before you read on, I’m going to need you to promise me you won’t take the code I’m about to show you to a production environment… You promise?...

Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored by Proxyman, nor am I affiliated with Proxyman in any way. I pay for my license myself, and this post is simply written as a guide to learning more about a tool that I find very important in the iOS Developer toolbox. Networking is an essential part of modern iOS applications. Most apps I’ve worked have some kind of networking component. Sometimes the networking layer involves user authentication, token refresh flows, and more. Other times, I’ll simply need to hit one or two endpoints to fetch new data or configuration files for my app....

This article has been updated for Swift 5.7 With Swift 5.6, Apple added a new keyword to the Swift language: any. As you'll see in this post, usage of the any keyword looks very similar to how you use the some keyword. They're both used in front of protocol names, and they both tell us something about how that protocol is used. Once you dig deeper into what any means, you'll find that it's very different from some. In fact, you might come to the conclusion that any is somewhat of the opposite of some. In this post, you will...

Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where you want to conveniently pass some object down via the SwiftUI environment. An easy way to do this is through the .environmentObject view modifier. The one downside of this view modifier and corresponding @EnvironmentObject property wrapper is that the object you add to the environment must be an observable object. Luckily, we can extend the SwiftUI environment to add our own objects to the @Environment property wrapper without the need to make these objects observable. For example, your app might have to do some date formatting, and maybe you’re looking for a...

I’ve recently been working on a background uploading feature for an app. One of the key aspects to get right with a feature like that is to correctly handle scenarios where your app is suspended by the system due to RAM constraints or other, similar, reasons. Testing this is easily done by clearing the RAM memory on your device. Unfortunately, this isn’t straightforward. But it’s also not impossible. Note that opening the task switcher and force closing your app from there is not quite the same as forcing your app to be suspended. Or rather, it’s not the same as...

When you're working with Arrays in Swift, it's likely that you'll want to sort them at some point. In Swift, there are two ways to sort an Array: Through the Comparable implementation for each element in your array By providing a closure to perform a manual/specialized comparison between elements If you have a homogenous array of elements, for example [String], you can rely on String's implementation of Comparable to sort an array of String in some sensible manner. There are two ways to sort an array of Comparable elements: var strings = ["Oh", "Hello", "World", "This", "Is", "An", "Unsorted", "Array"]...

When you're learning about databases or multithreaded programming, it's likely that you'll come across the term "atomic" at some point. Usually you'll hear the term in the context of an operation. For example, an atomic read / write operation. Or atomic access to a property. But what does this mean? Generally, you can summarize atomic as "one at a time". For example, when accessing or mutating a property is atomic, it means that only one read or write operation can be performed at a time. If you have a program that reads a property atomically, this means that the property...

Working with dates is hard, there is no doubt about that. And formatting dates properly for every user of your app is no easier (if you want to do everything manually). Luckily, the system can help us. For example, in the US one would write "October 15" while in The Netherlands we write 15 oktober. Note that the order of the date and the month is different, the spelling of the month is different and the capitalization is different too. The DateFormatter in iOS will handle a lot of this for you. For example, if you'd use the following code...

Apple introduced SF Symbols in iOS 13. SF Symbols allow developers to easily integrate icons in their apps. The SF Symbols icons integrate really well with the default system font, and provide a consistent look throughout the system. In iOS 14, Apple added over 750 new icons to the SF Symbols library for developers to use in their apps. Additionally, Apple has expanded SF Symbols to include multi-colored icons. For a full overview of the available SF Symbols that are available, including the newly added and multicolor symbols, download the SF Symbols 2 app from Apple's SF Symbols page. To...

A Double and Float are both used to represent decimal numbers, but they do so in slightly different ways. If you initialize a decimal number in Swift using as shown below, the Swift compiler will assume that you meant to create a Double: let val = 3.123 // val is inferred to be Double The reason for this is that Double is the more precise type when comparing it to Float. A Float holds a total of 8 positions, or 32 bits. Since Double is more precise, it can hold more positions. It uses 64 bits to do this. In...