Recent articles

There are several ways to initialize and configure properties in Swift. In this week’s Quick Tip, I would like to briefly highlight the possibility of using closures to initialize complex properties in your structs and classes. You will learn how you can use this approach of initializing properties, and when it’s useful. Let’s dive in […]

It’s been a while since Apple announced SF Symbols at WWDC 2019 and I remember how excited everybody was about them. The prospect of having an easy to integrate set of over 1,500 icons that you can display in nine weights sounds very appealing and has helped me prototype my ideas much quicker with good […]

Every once in a while I run into a situation where I update my iPhone to the latest iOS before I realize I’m still using an older version of Xcode for some projects. I usually realize this when Xcode tells me that it "Could not locate device support files". I’m sure many folks run into […]

If you’re ever amongst a group of developers and want to spark some intense discussion, all you need to do is call out that tabs are better than spaces. Or that indenting code with two spaces is much better than four. Or that the curly bracket after a function definition goes on the next line […]

Sometimes you need to calculate the difference between two dates in a specific format. For instance, you might need to know the difference between dates in hours. Or maybe you want to find out how many days there are between two dates. One approach for this would be to determine the number of seconds between […]

On iOS, you can swipe down on the home screen to access the powerful Spotlight search feature. Users can type queries in Spotlight and it will search through several areas of the system for results. You may have noticed that Spotlight includes iMessage conversations, emails, websites, and more. As an app developer, you can add […]

Arrays in Swift can hold on to all kinds of data. A common desire developers have when they use arrays, is to remove duplicate values from their arrays. Doing this is, unfortunately, not trivial. Objects that you store in an array are not guaranteed to be comparable. This means that it’s not always possible to […]

When we write code, we write bugs. It’s one of the laws of the universe that we can’t seem to escape. The tools we have to discover, analyze and fix these bugs are extremely important because without good debugging tools we’d be poking at a black box until we kind of figure out what might […]

If you’ve ever written or used a function that accepts a closure as one of its arguments, it’s likely that you’ve encountered the @escaping keyword. When a closure is marked as escaping in Swift, it means that the closure will outlive, or leave the scope that you’ve passed it to. Let’s look at an example […]

One of Swift’s incredibly useful features is its ability to dynamically compute the value of a property through a computed property. While this is a super handy feature, it can also be a source of confusion for newcomers to the language. A computed property can look a bit strange if you haven’t seen one before; […]