NSScreencast (free videos)

Sometimes we run into issues where SwiftUI doesn't quite do what we need. In some cases, SwiftUI views are powered by UIKit under the hood. Wouldn't it be great (and devious) to dig into the underlying UIKit views to customize things when vanilla SwiftUI just won't cut it? In this episode we'll look at a technique for discovering the UIKit underneath SwiftUI views.

One of the most impactful things you can do to improve productivity is to improve turnaround time when iterating on features. Playgrounds and Xcode Live Previews are great, but both have their limitations. In this episode we will explore how to utilize hot module reloading to have the simulator automatically reflect your changes when you save. It's magic, and will blow your mind!

One way of achieving modularization is to build frameworks using nested Xcode projects. This has the benefit of having everything in one place and can easily build the entire thing. You can also zero-in on a single project and just work from there if you want. Each sub-project can have its own tests, sample application, etc.

In this episode we will talk about the overview and motivation for a modular project architecture. Why split things up? I'll talk about the problems we face, what benefits we may achieve, and how can we approach the problem.

One of my favorite new features of Xcode 13 is support for Vim key bindings. In this episode we will see how to enable this and I'll give a quick tour of how to get around using Vim.

In the next few episodes we will explore the concept of Protocol Witnesses. This is an advanced topic that can be somewhat hard to approach, but in learning about Protocol Witnesses you will see how we can leverage the Swift language and functional programming to do some really cool things.

Context menus are a great affordance for performing related actions to a UI element. Users can tap and hold to view the context menu, and the gesture is consistent across the OS so users will likely already be familiar with it. In this episode we'll show how to set up a basic context menu with a custom preview with normal and destructive actions.

This is a discussion and code overview of another implementation of mapping models using key paths with a special guest, Antoine van der Lee! In this episode we talk about his initial goals and constraints, and some of the design tradeoffs he made while designing a solution that would give him a bidirectional mapping between Core Data entities and other model types.

First introduced in iOS 13, UICollectionViewCompositionalLayout is an amazing and powerful addition that gives you lots of flexibility when describing layouts. There are a few new types to get used to (namely sections, groups, and items) but they all work together allowing you to keep layout separate from your views and your data.

With UITableView no longer being encouraged for use, we need to replace this behavior with UICollectionView. This is where UICollectionViewListLayout comes into play. Using this layout we can get the familiar table view appearance in plain and grouped styles (as well as additional styles to support sidebars on iPad and macOS). This includes support for sticky headers and footers, swipe actions, and other UITableView behaviors that we've come to rely on.

In this episode we migrate our collection view to use the new cell registration API. Using this API we no longer need to cast dequeued cell types to our custom types. Instead, we set up the registration object with the cell type and the data we'll be passing to each cell. This further reduces the code we have to write in our datasource implementation and gives us more flexibility on how and where cells are configured.

In this episode we review the basic example app and start setting up our collection view in code. We start with the basic flow layout which is most common. Later we'll refactor this to use the newer style, but this episode introduces the series and sets up the foundation we'll build upon.

I've been working on rendering waveforms using mathematical functions and have found the experience to be both fun and enlightening. In this episode we will develop a method to render arbitrary functions using a Shape, then explore some mathematical concepts that can help us render a nice looking waveform that could be use to indicate activity in sound, speech, or other effects.

With the introduction of LazyVGrid and LazyHGrid In iOS 14 we now have access to much more powerful grid-based layouts in SwiftUI. In this episode We will examine the different types of layouts we can accomplish with flexible, fixed, and adaptive sizing for our rows and columns. We'll look at how animations work between different layouts, and how to consider larger screen sizes.

A few episodes back we covered how to wrap a UIActivityIndicatorView to show loading progress in SwiftUI. Now in iOS 14 this is built in. In this episode we'll cover the various styles, how to hook it up to a Progress instance, and how to create your own custom progress visualizations.

iOS 14 Beta is now available and one of the new features is Lazy stacks. With a normal stack, all the layout happened at once, which meant poor performance for large lists of content, grids, etc. With Lazy stacks the views are only created when they first come on screen, greatly increasing the usefulness of stacks for large or infinite collections of content.

Before Swift 5 we used to write our own Result type to contain a value or an error (but never both). A lot of 3rd party libraries brought along their own as well. Then Swift 5 came and brought us Result. Not only is it slightly different than the ones we might be familiar with, Swift's Result type also has some useful functionality up its sleeve.

Sometimes we need to create variants of our icons. This can be done by using template images and using a UIImageView with a tintColor change, however sometimes this isn't feasible. We can use our icons along with a mask to create new images of whatever color we want. In this episode we'll use UIGraphicsImageRenderer to quickly draw a new dimmed image for a highlighted button state.

Attaching gestures works quite a bit differently in SwiftUI than in UIKit. In this episode we will look at the @DragGesture property wrapper and how we can use gestures to update custom state that we can then use to transform our UI.

SwiftUI's declarative nature makes building UIs incredibly easy. In this episode we will build a wallet UI with cards. We will create a CardView so we can reuse it in multiple places. Then we will use transforms to alter it's size and position. Finally we will see how declarative animations work as we expand the cards apart.

Now that we've seen a taste of SwiftUI, let's dive into a real example and build an app. We'll have a first look at @State variables we can use to creating a binding between our state and our UI, and we'll run into a few puzzling errors and see how we can coax Xcode into giving us the right error message.

Back from WWDC 19 and blown away by the announcements. There's a lot to cover, but we'll start by digging into the most exciting announcement: SwiftUI. This is going to change everything...

Working with dates is a task that is universally applicable to Swift developers. Particularly when dealing with an API, dates can arrive in all shapes and sizes. We‘ll examine some of the common ones such as ISO 8601, show how to parse these formats into Date instances, and how to use DateFormatter to display them back again as a string. We‘ll also cover the importance of using en_US_POSIX and honoring the user‘s Locale when displaying dates.

In this episode we configure our iOS app to receive push notifications, adding the OneSignal SDK to our project, configuring the Notification Service extension, and testing it out on a real device.

In this episode we look at how to generate a certification for adding push notification support for your app, using OneSignal as our push notification provider

In this episode we will setup iTerm2, profiles, custom color schemes, and fonts.

In this episode we look at some of the basic system preferences on macOS High Sierra. We set up the Dock, Keyboard shortcuts, and show how to customize key repeat timing outside of the preferences window.

UITableView can support scrolling through many rows of data, however fetching large amounts of remote data can slow down your app, use up too much memory, and bog down your web server. This is all wasteful if users aren‘t ever going to scroll down that far. In this episode you‘ll learn how to perform automatic UITableView pagination using an easy technique.

In order to use CloudKit to read or write private data (or to write in the public database) the user will have to be signed in to iCloud on their device. If they are not, they'll not have a great experience, and things won't work. In this episode we'll check the account status before trying to save a record in CloudKit. We'll also respond to the notification to know when the user's account status has changed so we can react accordingly.

The first episode in a new series on CloudKit, here we see how to setup our project to use CloudKit as well as how to create and save our first record.

In this episode I am joined by Soroush Khanlou. Together we pair up to implement the Poker Hands Kata. We start off by parsing the raw string input into structured types, complete with tests.

In this free episode, we take a look at a core Swift 2 feature: Optionals. Unlike Objective-C, where nil is considered a no-op, in Swift nil is specifically recognized by the compiler, which forces you to handle cases where nil might be present in a variable.

In this free episode, Ben explores Swift 2 functions, how argument labels work, returning tuples, the guard clause, as well as extending behavior on core types.

In this episode we take a look at Swift 2's basic types such as Int, Double, Bool, Array, and Dictionary. This episode is part of a series covering Swift 2 from a beginner's perspective.

Continuing our build out of Road Trip DJ, this time I focus on the music player, and keeping the play/pause button in sync on UIToolbar, which proves to be more difficult than it should be.

In this episode we continue Road Trip DJ and implement the media picker controller, talk about the different modes that in can operate in and how that affects the usability of this app. We also consider how we're going to build a playlist and keep appending items to it.

In this episode we start building an app from scratch called Road Trip DJ. The idea is the build a playlist of music on the fly while it is playing. This is an app I've wanted to build for a while and it serves as a good, small app we can build from start to finish.

In this episode we cover a basic but fundamentally important topic: dealing with dates & times. Particularly when dealing with an API, dates can arrive in all shapes and sizes. We'll examine some of the common ones, talk about how to parse these formats into NSDate instances, and how to use NSDateFormatter to display them back again as a string.

This week we have another free bonus video on the improvements that Xcode 5 brings to Autolayout. As something that has been quite obnoxious to work with in the past, many people dismissed auto layout when it was introduced to iOS 6. With these improvements it is much more friendly and dare I say... usable?

To celebrate the launch of iOS 7, here is a bonus free screencast covering a few of the concepts in iOS 7 such as the status bar behavior, tint color, and navigation bar transitions. We'll also take a look at Xcode 5 with a couple of the new features, including the integrated test runner.

We continue with our example chat application here and add the ability post a message, poll for updates, and receive push notifications. This episode utilizes a pod calles MessagesTableView controller to present an SMS like interface for the messages.

This week we take a look at Windows Azure Mobile Services, a back-end for mobile applications that has first class iOS support. In this episode we begin building a full featured chat application. This is part 1 of 2, in which we set up a new mobile service, wire up the SDK with CocoaPods, set up Twitter authentication and enrich the data using Javascript on the server. This episode has been sponsored by Microsoft.

In this episode, we'll create a CocoaPod out of the modal picker view component we created in episodes 25 & 26. We'll see how to tag & push our code to a github repository and create a podspec so that others can use this component in their projects.

The latest version of the LLVM compiler supports some excellent new syntax additions to the Objective-C language. In this episode, I cover what the new syntax is, how to use it, and a few caveats to look out for.

HTTP Caching is an important concept to understand when building iPhone apps that consume HTTP APIs. In this episode, we'll see how leveraging Etags, Last Modified dates, and Cache-Control headers can help make your app more efficient and tolerable to use.

In this episode, we'll set up a free continuous integration server called Jenkins (previously Hudson) to run our build. We'll configure it to automatically check out changes from git, run the build, and finally run all of our tests. We'll then use a conversion script to translate the test output into JUnit test report files that Jenkins natively understands.

In this screencast I'll pull down data from an API, map the JSON to a Core Data Managed Object and import them in bulk on a background thread. Then we'll display the imported content in a UITableView using NSFetchedResultsController.

Core Data is Apple's framework for persisting data on Mac & iOS. It can be though of as an ORM, however it's probably a lot different than most ORMs you've used in the past. In this episode, we'll set up Core Data from scratch so you can see all the moving parts.

Blocks are a great way to simplify code when dealing with asynchronous tasks (using GCD), callbacks, and atomic operations. In this episode, we'll look at a few ways you can use blocks in your code.

In this episode, I'll show you how to convert your project to use Automatic Reference Counting (or ARC) to eliminate the need to use retain, release, autorelease, and dealloc in your Objective-C code!

UITableView can support skimming through many rows of data, however fetching large amounts of remote data can slow down your app, use up too much memory, and bog down your web server. This is all wasteful if users aren't ever going to scroll down that far. In this episode you'll learn how to perform automatic UITableView paging using an easy technique.