The Blog

On iOS, there are several ways to send notifications to users. And typically every method of sending push notifications has a different goal. For example, when you’re sending a remote push notification to a user, you will typically do this because something interesting happened outside of the user’s device. Somebody might have sent them a message for example, or something exciting happened during a sports game. However, when we schedule notifications on the device locally, we typically do this as Read more…

On iOS, it’s possible to send users from one app to the next or to send them from a webpage into an app. A link that’s used to send a user to an app is typically called a deeplink. Often, there is more than one way for a deeplink to be passed to your app. Because of this, it’s not always trivial to handle deeplinks. In today’s article, I will go over two kinds of deeplinks that you can support Read more…

One of the features that got screen time at WWDC 2018 but never really took off is the signposting API, also known as os_signpost. Built on top of Apple’s unified logging system, signposts are a fantastic way for you to gain insight into how your code behaves during certain operations. In this post, I will show you how to add signpost logging to your app, and how you can analyze the signpost output using Instruments. Adding signposts to your code Read more…

There are many reasons for code to function suboptimally. In a post, I have shown you how to use the Time Profiler to measure the time spent in each method in your code, and how to analyze the results. While a lot of performance-related problems can be discovered, analyzed and fixed using these tools, memory usage must often be debugged slightly differently. Especially if it’s related to memory leaks. In today’s post, I will show you how to use the Read more…

Finding slow code with Instruments Every once in a while we run into performance problems. One thing you can do when this happens is to measure how long certain things in your code take. You can do this using signposts. However, there are times when we need deeper insights in our code. More specifically, sometimes you simply want to know exactly how long each function in your code takes to execute. You can gain these insights using the Time Profiler Read more…

Swift allows us to use a static prefix on methods and properties to associate them with the type that they’re declared on rather than the instance. We can also use static properties to create singletons of our objects which, as you have probably heard before is a huge anti-pattern. So when should we use properties or methods that are defined on a type rather than an instance? In this blog post, I’m going to go over several use cases of Read more…

If you have spent some time with SwiftUI or if you have watched the WWDC videos on SwiftUI this year, you may have noticed that views in SwiftUI have a property called body of type some View. The some keyword is new in Swift 5.1 and it’s part of a feature called opaque result types (SE-0244). What is this some keyword then? And how can you use it in your code? I aim to answer these questions in this blog Read more…

Whenever we write code, we want our code to be well-designed. We want it to be flexible, elegant and safe. We want to make sure that Swift’s type system and the compiler catch as many of our mistakes as possible. It’s especially interesting how Swift’s type system can help us avoid obvious errors. For example, Swift won’t allow you to assign an Int to a String property like this: var anInt = 10 anInt = “Hello, World!” The Swift compiler Read more…

When your app shows images from the network in a table view or collection view, you need to load the images asynchronously to make sure your list scrolls smoothly. More importantly, you’ll need to somehow connect the image that you’re loading to the correct cell in your list (instead of table view or collection view, I’m going to say list from now on). And if the cell goes out of view and is reused to display new data with a Read more…

Lots of iOS developers eventually run into code that calls upon DispatchQueue.main. It’s often clear that this is done to update the UI, but I’ve seen more than a handful of cases where developers use DispatchQueue.main as an attempt to get their code to work if the UI doesn’t update as they expect, or if they run into crashes they don’t understand. For that reason, I would like to dedicate this post to the question “When should I use DispatchQueue.main? Read more…