AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers

Easter weekend was awesome

April 20, 2022 Jeroen Leenarts Episode 76
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers
Easter weekend was awesome
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers +
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Show Notes Transcript

Easter weekend, so I was offline a lot the last four days. Including my regular recording evening. Sometimes personal life takes priority. But just a day later we should be good with a quick recording. Six articles this week which I think you should read.

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Jeroen Leenarts:

Hi, and welcome to the 76th episode of my podcast. My name is John Lennon's and I've been developing software for over 20 years developing iOS app for over 10 years. And I'm running that skullcaps for over nine years. If an iOS app developer, you should listen to my podcast because we'll keep you updated on interesting articles, conferences and events you might not have heard about. In this episode, I'm going to talk about exporting data from unified logging system in Swift transitions in Swift UI, unit testing and UI testing in Swift, the hidden cost of your dependencies, how to create get up action to upload D Sims, and swift UI performance tips. So let's get started. So it's already Tuesday. So normally, I released my episodes on Mondays. But it's been an interesting weekend, I had like two Easter weekend. So I've been off from Friday till Monday, and I completely disconnected of everything. So that also meant that I couldn't record my episodes on Monday. So recording it right now been very busy today. So I'm going to do a quick recording, and dive into the news articles of this week's right away, I will update you more on things that are happening in my work life and private life next week. So this week, I will just make do with some articles that I think you should be aware of. Also, make sure to check back my previous episodes for some tips on conferences you should attend. So definitely check that one out. It's in the show notes. So easy to find. So just let's get started and dive in with the first article. First article is by Facebook Majeed. So that's a follow up article of his previous article on the unified logging system in Swift. And this week, he writes a nice follow up article that shows you how you can export data from the unified logging system in Swift. So it's a bit of user interface that you can put in your app to make sure that you can actually easily capture the logging from the unified logging system without much hassle by an end user. So you can capture data from the unified logging system by doing some sort of a Vulcan death grip on your device and then exporting it somewhere deep from within Settings. But with this bit, that magic suggests, you can facilitate this process to your users much easier and much more convenient. Thus, allowing your users to much easier, catch you some logging if they run into issues with your app. So definitely check it out. If you use ours lock in your code, make sure to look at this article, because there's really good tips in there. The next article is by objective c.dl transitions in Swift UI. So it's, it's an article based on their findings from their swift UI workshop, because they noticed quite often that very few people seem to know about transitions in Swift UI, even though they're not very complicated, and very, very useful. transitions happen when a view is removed from the View Tree or added to the View Tree. However, if you've done swift UI, you will have noticed that there is no actual way to add views to the View Tree. There's no add sub view like yet you could write. Instead, you can add and remove views through the combination of state change and using an if statement or a switch for each. In other words, fuse somehow added and removed for us automatically gets transitions fired only once. So it's an article about transitions in Swift UI, and how you can deal with them and make sure that they behave and are present in your app in a way that you want them to happen. Definitely check this one out, because it's another one of those really deep articles because I have that as a lot of explanation and helpful. Few hierarchy images that will allow you to better understand what he is talking about in his descriptions. Next article is by a new blogger, at least someone that I don't know yet, let's call her colleague, hope I said that correctly, unit testing and UI testing and swift. His article covers unit testing and UI testing, which together play an important role not only in proving that code is correct at the unit level, but also in demonstrating that the application meets user requirements. While unit test seeks to create rapid and regular feedback loops for developers to gain confidence in correctness of the code. UI testing validates the application as a whole from an end users perspective to ensure that final product performs as expected by users. In his article he cover explains what unit testing and UI testing is. And he also provide some case studies on how you can actually work with these two types of testing in Xcode and how you can get familiar with this if you're not yet familiar with this concept of automatic testing to begin with. So, good reminder if you are working with unit testing and UI testing and the definite must rate if you are not yet familiar with these concepts. Then there's the fourth article called The hidden cost of your dependencies. It's by a JSON Sarita, and dependencies in your projects have hidden possible unthought of, or ignored costs when adding dependency managers tools like Swift package manager and node package manager, make adding third party libraries almost too easy. With a few clicks, you can import 1000s of lines of code into your project and shipped to users. Sounds great, right? You got the task done. But at what cost? Did you think of the main say, the maintainability of the code impact to your career growth, security implications, the complexity of what you just brought in? Or how about transitive dependencies, because a dependency can have their own dependencies, and those get brought along with your dependency, as well. So especially with no packages, those can be like quite a lot of packages that are underneath just one single import. So using a dependency is not always bad, but you should be intentional about it. And when you want to use it, and what the trade offs are. So in this article, Jason goes over the hidden costs of dependencies. So that's complexity versions, ripple effects of updating dependencies, build times that new code is your support. So any dependencies code is something that you need to make sure that it works in your context. And it's, it's a good overview, if you are working with third party dependencies, and you have to make your assessments on whether or not you should actually work with this third party dependency. So at stream, we also tried to make sure that we hit all the checkboxes to make sure that stream is a third party dependency isn't bad for your codebase. And we, we put a lot of effort in making sure that everything works that this is supposed to end that the impact of this dependency is as little as possible on the rest of your codebase. So lots of interesting bits in this article. And I fully aligned with what Jason Sarita says, because I'm also one of these developers, that always thinks that fewer dependencies is often always, well, not often always, but most of the time is better than, than having more dependencies. The fifth article is by some wise how to create a GitHub actually to upload decent GitHub actions or jobs that you can run on GitHub machines. Sounds simple. When you build an iOS code base on GitHub actions, you also need some way to get these hymns. That's the debug symbols of your, of your compiled binary somewhere. So probably, you want to upload it to some sort of a crash analytics server, or he wants to have it locally so that once crash logs come in, you can at least a symbolic aid and that you can understand what the crash was about right? So in this article, Sam goes over the details of what you need to do to get these these sims are working. So firstly, create a Git workflow, then he defines job within a workflow, then you need to get some interaction go with the app store API is using Fastlane. And then you're off to the races. The reason that you need the app store API details is that if you use bitcode in your applications, binaries, so if you have that enabled in Xcode, you need to make sure that you get the decent from the app store API, because those are actually correct for the finally deployed binaries of your application. Because if you use the decent starter generated locally, and you have bitcode enabled, then those do not match up with what the end user is actually running on their device. Then the final article is by my colleague, Martin Petroski, he put an article called swift web performance tips on his own personal blog. And it's a really nice overview of what it takes to make sure that swift UI user interface works all the time without any hitches or glitches on any device that is currently supporting swift UI for on device. So I think that's iOS 13, and onwards. So good tips in there some simple things that you should be aware of, and also some more intricate things and ways that can actually make sure that you understand where the performance is going within your process. So that's, that's some details of the instruments application that is packaged with Xcode, which is a profiler that you can use to analyze the performance characteristics of your iOS application. definite must read really good article. And I think this is also one that you should check out. So this week, about like six articles for you exporting data from unified logging transitions in Swift UI unit testing and UI testing the Swift the hidden costs of dependencies, how to create a get of X to upload the Sims and swift why performance tips and I think you should shouldn't have a look at all say So these articles. So that's it for this week. If you have any feedback, please reach out on Twitter at app Force One. I'm just a DM or an app mentioned away. And I really look forward to hearing from you what you think of a podcast and articles that link in my podcast. Talk to you again next week. Bye bye