Recent articles

In iOS 14 Apple added the ability for developers to create collection views that look and feel like table views, except they are far, far more powerful. To do this, Apple introduced a new UICollectionViewCell subclass called UICollectionViewListCell. This new cell class allows us to implement several tableviewcell-like principles, including swipe actions. You can add […]

In iOS 14 you can use the new UICollectionView.CellRegistration class to register and configure your UICollectionViewCell instances. So no more let cellIdentifier = "MyCell", no more collectionView.dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier: "MyCell", for: indexPath) and best of all, you no longer need to cast the cell returned by dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier:for:) to your custom cell class. Adopting UICollectionView.CellRegistration in your project […]

Views in SwiftUI are thrown away and recreated regularly. When this happens, the entire view struct is initialized all over again. Because of this, any values that you create in a SwiftUI view are reset to their default values unless you’ve marked these values using @State. This means that if you declare a view that […]

In SwiftUI, views can be driven by an @Published property that’s part of an ObservableObject. If you’ve used SwiftUI and @Published before, following code should look somewhat familiar to you: class DataSource: ObservableObject { @Published var names = [String]() } struct NamesList: View { @ObservedObject var dataSource: DataSource var body: some View { List(dataSource.names, id: […]

If you have a Combine publisher and you want to ignore the first n elements that are published by that publisher, you can use the dropFirst(_:) operator. This operator will swallow any values emitted until the threshold you specify is reached. For example, dropFirst(1) will ignore the first emitted value from a publisher: [1, 2, […]

Last week, my attention was caught by a question that Dennis Parussini asked on Twitter. Dennis wanted to recursively make calls to a paginated API to load all pages of data before rendering UI. Since I love Combine and interesting problems I immediately started thinking about ways to achieve this using a nice, clean API. […]

A Double and Float are both used to represent decimal numbers, but they do so in slightly different ways. If you initialize a decimal number in Swift using as shown below, the Swift compiler will assume that you meant to create a Double: let val = 3.123 // val is inferred to be Double The […]

Property wrappers are a feature that was introduced in Swift 5.1 and they play a huge role in SwiftUI and Combine which are two frameworks that shipped alongside Swift 5.1 in iOS 13. The community was quick to create some useful examples that were embraced by folks relatively quickly. As a user of property wrappers, […]

This week I wanted to write about something non-technical. And while the topic of this week’s post isn’t a technical one, I think it’s an important topic for developers who want to expand their knowledge, and deepen their skills. I have been a developer professionally for more than ten years at this point and in […]

There are several ways to handle errors in Combine. Most commonly you will either use catch or replaceError if you want to implement a mechanism that allows you to recover from an error. For example, catch is useful if you want to retry a network operation with a delay. The catch and replaceError operators look […]