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...

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...

In iOS 13, we gained the ability to easily send and receive data using web sockets through URLSession. With async/await, we gained the ability to fetch data from servers using the await keyword and we can iterate over asynchronous sequences using async for loops. We can even read data from a URL one line at a time by calling the lines property on URL: let url = URL(string: "https://donnywals.com")! for try await line in url.lines { // use line } While this is really cool and allows us to build apps that ingest data in real time if the server...

Swift 5.7 introduces many new features that involve generics and protocols. In this post, we're going to explore an extremely powerful new features that's called "primary associated types". By the end of this post you will know and understand what primary associated types are, and why I think they are extremely important and powerful to help you write better code. If your familiar with Swift 5.6 or earlier, you might know that protocols with associated types have always been somewhat of an interesting beast. They were hard to use sometimes, and before Swift 5.1 we would always have to resort...

Protocols are an extremely important part in the Swift language, and in recent updates we've received some new capabilities around protocol and generics that allow us to be much more intentional about how we use protocols in our code. This is done through the any and some keywords. In this post, you will learn everything you need to know about the similarities and differences between these two keywords. We'll start with an introduction of each keyword, and then you'll learn a bit more about the problems each keyword solves, and how you can decide whether you should use some or...

Working with dates isn’t easy. And showing them to your users in the correct locale hasn’t always been easy either. With iOS 15, Apple introduced a new way to convert Date objects from and to String. This new way comes in the form of the new Formatter api that replaces DateFormatter. As any seasoned iOS developer will tell you, DateFormatter objects are expensive to create, and therefor kind of tedious to manage correctly. With the new Formatter api, we no longer need to work with DateFormatter. Instead, we can ask a date to format itself based on our requirements in...

Closures are a powerful programming concept that enable many different programming patterns. However, for lots of beginning programmers, closures can be tricky to use and understand. This is especially true when closures are used in an asynchronous context. For example, when they’re used as completion handlers or if they’re passed around in an app so they can be called later. In this post, I will explain what closures are in Swift, how they work, and most importantly I will show you various examples of closures with increasing complexity. By the end of this post you will understand everything you need...

With Swift 5.6, Apple added a new keyword to the Swift language: any. As you'll see in this post, usage of the any keyword looks very similar to how you use the some keyword. They're both used in front of protocol names, and they both tell us something about how that protocol is used. Once you dig deeper into what any means, you'll find that it's very different from some. In fact, you might come to the conclusion that any is somewhat of the opposite of some. In this post, you will learn everything you need to know about the...

Async/await will be the defacto way of doing asynchronous programming on iOS 15 and above. I've already written quite a bit about the new Swift Concurrency features, and there's still plenty to write about. In this post, I'm going to take a look at building an asynchronous image loader that has support for caching. SwiftUI on iOS 15 already has a component that allows us to load images from the network but it doesn't support caching (other than what’s already offered by URLSession), and it only works with a URL rather than also accepting a URLRequest. The component will be...