Xcode 14 beta 2 came with WWDC’22 and one of the highlights of the upcoming Xcode is faster builds. What’s new in Xcode mentions that Xcode 14 can be up to 25% faster, mostly due to improved parallelism. For testing this out, I looked for a large open source iOS app. WordPress for iOS is available on GitHub, and it was pretty easy to set up the local development setup. My 16″ MBP is from 2019 and has 2,3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4… Read more Comparing build speeds of Xcode 13 and Xcode 14b2 →
The Swift standard library includes a peculiar struct CollectionOfOne. It just represents a single value as a collection. Since it represents only a single value, then it is more efficient than creating an Array with a single element, which involves in allocating a buffer. Also, all the collection functions require inspecting the buffer whereas CollectionOfOne can hard-code many of these, like count which is always one. It can make a difference in performance critical code, but most of the time it does not make a real difference if we create… Read more CollectionOfOne in Swift →
One of the cases where we would like to build debug and release configurations differently is when we want to enable some extra features. A concrete example could be a debug view which has a list of commands or displays additional information. In this blog post, we are going to take a look at a Xcode project which only links a local Swift package in debug builds. The project setup In the example project, we have an iOS app and a local Swift package “DebugFeatures”. The Swift package description also… Read more Linking a Swift package only in debug builds →
UICollectionViewCompositionalLayout was an important change to how we create collection view layouts. In iOS14 Apple added a new static function to this class which creates a layout object for list views. Meaning, it is very easy to create a list views which look like a table view we are familiar with. The static list() function takes a configuration object UICollectionLayoutListConfiguration which allows further to configure the appearance of the header view. For example, supplementary header views are enabled here. In this blog post, we’ll create a list view with a… Read more Building a list view with collection view in UIKit →
Recently I was asked a question about creating an app which has SwiftUI views but no navigation logic in it. Instead, UIKit controls how views are presented. It is a fair question since SwiftUI views have navigation support, but not everything is there if we need to support previous iOS versions as well, or we have a case of an app which have both UIKit and SwiftUI views. Therefore, let’s take a look at on one approach, how to handle navigation on the UIKit side but still use SwiftUI views.… Read more UIKit navigation with SwiftUI views →
SwiftUI has a Picker view available with multiple different styles. One example of when it falls short is when we want to use a multi component picker with wheel style. One way how to try to achieve this is using a HStack with two Picker views, but it does not work very well, especially when trying to show it inside a Form view. So what else we can do? If something can’t be done in SwiftUI then we can use UIKit instead. In my case, I wanted to create a… Read more Using a multi component picker in a SwiftUI form →
XCTExpectFailure is a function in XCTest framework which tackles the problem of managing failing tests. Test which are broken, but not ready to be fixed. An example use-case is when refactoring code which causes some tests to fail but since the whole refactoring is far for complete we might want to hold off fixing tests now because everything can change yet again. This is when we can use XCTExpectFailure function to mark the entire test or just a code block in a test as an expected failure. Every time we… Read more Using XCTExpectFailure in XCTests →
UIButton.Configuration API was introduced in WWDC’21 with a goal of making it easier to create buttons with many styles, sizes, colours etc. Configurations API comes with functions for creating common button configurations: filled(), bordered(), borderedProminent(), borderedTinted(), borderless(), plain(), gray(), tinted(). These configurations can be further customized. One benefit of the API is that it will take care of different states of the button like highlighted, disabled, hovered and so on and applies different styling based on the state. Most of the time that is all we needed, but additionally we… Read more Getting started with UIButton.Configuration on iOS →
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