With iOS 17, we’ve gained a new way to provide observable data to our SwiftUI views. Until iOS 17, we’d use either an ObservableObject with @StateObject, @ObservedObject, or @EnvironmentObject whenever we had a reference type that we wanted to observe in one of our SwiftUI views. For lots of apps this worked absolutely fine, but these objects have a dependency on the Combine framework (which in my opinion isn’t a big deal), and they made it really hard for developers to limit which properties a view would observe. In iOS 17, we gained the new @Observable macro. I wrote about...

As we work on projects, we usually add more code than we remove. At least that’s how things are at the beginning of our project. While our project grows, the needs of the codebase change, and we start refactoring things. One thing that’s often quite hard to get exactly right when coding is the kinds of abstractions and design patterns we actually need. In this post, I would like to explore a mechanism that I like to leverage to make sure my code is robust without actually worrying too much about abstractions and design patterns in the first place. We’ll...

Having a local git repository is a smart thing to do. It’s even smarter to push your local git repositories up to a remote server so that you can collaborate with others, clone your repository on a separate machine, or have a backup of your code in case you’re replacing your current development machine with another. A possibly less obvious benefit of hosting your git repository somewhere is that lots of git servers provide useful features like Pull Requests for code reviews, issue tracking, and more. In this post, you will learn how you can set up a new repository...

Git is great, and when it works well it can be a breeze to work with. You push , pull, commit, branch, merge, but then… you get into a merge conflict, In this post, we’ll explore merge conflicts. We’ll look at why they happen, and what we can do to avoid running into merge conflicts in the first place. Let’s start by understanding why a merge conflict happens. Understanding why a merge conflict happens Git is usually pretty good at merging together branches or commits. So why does it get confused sometimes? And what does it mean when a merge...

I’ll just say this right off the bat. There’s no such thing as git “for iOS Developers”. However, as iOS Developers we do make use of git. And that means that it makes a lot of sense to understand git, what it is, what it’s not, and most importantly how we can use it effectively and efficiently in our work. In this post, I’d like to outline some of the key concepts, commands, and principles that you’ll need to know as an iOS Developer that works with git. By the end of this post you will have a pretty good...

In a previous post, I explained how you can make your NSManagedObject subclasses codable. This was a somewhat tedious process that involves a bunch of manual work. Specifically because the most convenient way I've found wasn't all that convenient. It's easy to forget to set your managed object context on your decoder's user info dictionary which would result in failed saves in Core Data. With SwiftData it's so much easier to define model objects so it makes sense to take a look at making SwiftData models Codable to see if it's better than Core Data. Ultimately, SwiftData is a wrapper...

WIth the introduction of Xcode 15 beta and its corresponding beta OSses (I would say iOS 17 beta, but of course we also get macOS, iPadOS, and other betas...) Apple has introduced new state mangement tools for SwiftUI. One of these new tools is the @Bindable property wrapper. In an earlier post I explained that @Binding and @Bindable do not solve the same problem, and that they will co-exist in your applications. In this post, I would like to clarify the purpose and the use cases for @Bindable a little bit better so that you can make better decisions when...

With iOS 17, macOS Sonoma and the other OSses from this year's generation, Apple has made a couple of changes to how we work with data in SwiftUI. Mainly, Apple has introduced a Combine-free version of @ObservableObject and @StateObject which takes the shape of the @Observable macro which is part of a new package called Observation. One interesting addition is the @Bindable property wrapper. This property wrapper co-exists with @Binding in SwiftUI, and they cooperate to allow developers to create bindings to properties of observable classes. So what's the role of each of these property wrappers? What makes them different...

With Swift 5.9 and Xcode 15, we have the ability to leverage Macros in Swift. Macros can either be written with at @ prefix or with a # prefix, depending on where they're being used. If you want to see some examples of Macros in Swift, you can take a look at this repository that sheds some light on both usage and structure of Macros. When we look at Macros in action, they can look a lot like property wrappers: @CustomCodable struct CustomCodableString: Codable { @CodableKey(name: "OtherName") var propertyWithOtherName: String var propertyWithSameName: Bool func randomFunction() { } } The example...

As a developer, joining a new project or company is often a daunting and scary task. You have to get aquatinted with not just a whole new team of people, but you also have to familiarize yourself with an entirely new codebase that might use new naming conventions, follows patterns that you’re not familiar with, or even uses tooling that you’ve never seen before. There are plenty of reasons to be overwhelmed when you’re a new member of any engineering team, and there’s no reason to feel bad about that. In the past two years, I’ve done a lot of...