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?...

In iOS 13, we gained the ability to easily send and receive data using web sockets through URLSession. With async/await, we gained the ability to fetch data from servers using the await keyword and we can iterate over asynchronous sequences using async for loops. We can even read data from a URL one line at a time by calling the lines property on URL: let url = URL(string: "https://donnywals.com")! for try await line in url.lines { // use line } While this is really cool and allows us to build apps that ingest data in real time if the server...

In an earlier post, I wrote about different ways that you can bridge your existing asynchronous code over to Swift’s new Concurrency system that leverages async / await. The mechanisms shown there work great for code where your code produces a single result that can be modeled as a single value. However in some cases this isn’t possible because your existing code will provide multiple values over time. This is the case for things like download progress, the user’s current location, and other similar situations. Generally speaking, these kinds of patterns would be modeled as AsyncSequence objects that you can...

Sometimes in SwiftUI apps I’ll find that I have a model with an optional value that I’d like to pass to a view that requires a non optional value. This is especially the case when you’re using Core Data in your SwiftUI apps and use auto-generated models. Consider the following example: class SearchService: ObservableObject { @Published var results: [SearchResult] = [] @Published var query: String? } Let me start by acknowledging that yes, this object can be written with a query: String = "" instead of an optional String?. Unfortunately, we don’t always own or control the models and objects...

If you want to make sure that your code adopts Swift concurrency as correctly as possible in Swift 5.7, it's a good idea to enable the Strict Concurrency Checking (SWIFT_STRICT_CONCURRENCY) in your project. To do this, select your project's target and navigate to the Build Settings tab. Make sure you select All from the list of settings that is shown (Basic is the default) and type Strict Concurrency in the searchbar to find the Strict Concurrency Checking build setting. The screenshot below shows all the relevant parts for you to see: The default value for this setting is Minimal which...

One of the goals of the Swift team with Swift’s concurrency features is to provide a model that allows developer to write safe code by default. This means that there’s a lot of time and energy invested into making sure that the Swift compiler helps developers detect, and prevent whole classes of bugs and concurrency issues altogether. One of the features that helps you prevent data races (a common concurrency issue) comes in the form of actors which I’ve written about before. While actors are great when you want to synchronize access to some mutable state, they don’t solve every...

UPDATE FOR XCODE 14.1: This issue appears to have been partially fixed in Xcode 14.1. Some occurences of the warning are fixed, others aren't. In this post I'm collecting situations me and others run into and track whether they are fixed or not. If you have another sample that you think is similar, please send a sample of your code on Twitter as a Github Gist. Dear reader, if you've found this page you're probably encountering the error from the post title. Let me start by saying this post does not offer you a quick fix. Instead, it serves to...

Swift 5.7 introduces many new features that involve generics and protocols. In this post, we're going to explore an extremely powerful new features that's called "primary associated types". By the end of this post you will know and understand what primary associated types are, and why I think they are extremely important and powerful to help you write better code. If your familiar with Swift 5.6 or earlier, you might know that protocols with associated types have always been somewhat of an interesting beast. They were hard to use sometimes, and before Swift 5.1 we would always have to resort...

Protocols are an extremely important part in the Swift language, and in recent updates we've received some new capabilities around protocol and generics that allow us to be much more intentional about how we use protocols in our code. This is done through the any and some keywords. In this post, you will learn everything you need to know about the similarities and differences between these two keywords. We'll start with an introduction of each keyword, and then you'll learn a bit more about the problems each keyword solves, and how you can decide whether you should use some or...

This post is up to date for Xcode 14.0 Beta 1 and iOS 16 Beta 1. It supersedes a version of this post that you can find here On iOS 15, Apple granted developers the ability to present partially visible bottom sheets using a component called UISheetPresentationController. Originally, we had to resort to using a UIHostingController to bring this component to SwiftUI. With iOS 16, we don't have to do this anymore. You can make use of the presentationDetents view modifier to configure your sheets to be fully visible, approximately half visible, or some custom fraction of the screen's height....