The Blog

Optimizing Your Application’s Reviews

We all love the idea of getting loads of App Reviews, preferably with five stars and a description that explains why our apps are amazing. Unfortunately, users often don’t take the time to reviews the apps they enjoy. Instead, users will review your app when they’re unhappy. If something about your app doesn’t please them or something doesn’t work as expected, they will happily write an angry review and rate your app one star. So how do we get people Read more…

By donnywals, ago

What is Module Stability in Swift and why should you care?

The Swift team has recently released Swift 5.1. This version of the Swift language contains many cool features like Function Builders that are used for SwiftUI and Property Wrappers that can be used to add extra functionality to properties. This release also contains a feature called Module Stability. But what is this feature? And what does it mean to you as a developer? In this week’s blog post, I will explain this to you. But before we get to Module Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Finding the difference between two Arrays

Many applications work with data, often they are built to retrieve data and display this data to the user in a table view, collection view, list (if you’re using SwiftUI) or a different kind of component. It’s not uncommon for this data to change and when it does you might be interested in figuring out what elements were added to the data and which items were removed. This isn’t always straightforward so up until now you might have written code Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Getting started with unit testing on iOS – part 2

In part 1 of this two-part blog post, you’ve learned how to write synchronous unit tests for a login view model. As a reminder, you saw how to implement tests for the following requirements: When both login fields are empty, pressing the login button should trigger an error that informs the user that both fields are mandatory. When one of the two fields is empty, pressing the login button should trigger an error that informs the user that the empty Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Getting started with unit testing on iOS – part 1

Recently, I ran a poll on Twitter and discovered that a lot of people are not sure how to get started writing tests, or they struggle to get time approved to write tests for their code. In this blogpost, I will take you through some of the first steps you can take to start writing tests of your own and help you pave the way to a more stable codebase. Why bother with tests at all? You might be wondering Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Supporting Low Data Mode in your app

Together with iOS 13, Apple announced a new feature called Low Data Mode. This feature allows users to limit the amount data that’s used by apps on their phone. The low data mode setting is available in the settings app. Whenever a user is on a slow network, a very busy network or on a network that might charge them for every megabyte they download, users might not want to spend their limited data budget on large fancy images or Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Spend less time maintaining your test suite by using the Builder Pattern

Often when we write code, we have to initialize objects. Sometimes the object’s initializer doesn’t take any arguments and a simple let object = MyObject() call suffices to create your object, other times things aren’t so simple and you need to supply multiple arguments to an object’s initializer. If you have read my previous post, Cleaning up your dependencies with protocols , you might have refactored your code to use protocol composition to wrap dependencies up into a single object Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Cleaning up your dependencies with protocols

If you’re into writing clean, testable and maintainable code you must have come across the term “Dependency Injection” at some point. If you’re not sure what dependency injection is, that’s okay. I will explain it briefly so we’re all on the same page before we get to the main point of this post. Dependency Injection in a Nutshell Dependency injection is the practice of making sure that no object creates or manages its own dependencies. This is best illustrated using Read more…

By donnywals, ago

About my iOS development book…

It’s been almost two years since I blogged on this page. I know, two years is a long break for a person that claims to love “Writing about my everyday coding problems and solutions”. Well, there is a very valid reason for my absence because I have been working on a book! Two actually, but they’re mostly two sides of the same coin. My first book ever is named “Mastering iOS 10 Programming”. It’s been published by Packt Publishing and Read more…

By donnywals, ago

Enforcing modular code with frameworks in Xcode

Every iOS developer I know dreams of writing code that’s DRY, modular, testable and reusable. While this is a great goal to strive for it’s often quite hard to write code that is completely modular. It just takes one oversight to blow most of the modularity you have achieved right out the window. One technique that people use to make it easier to write modular code is to try and ensure that a certain part of their code, for instance Read more…

By donnywals, ago