AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers

King's day and some nice content

April 26, 2022 Episode 77
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers
King's day and some nice content
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers +
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Show Notes Transcript
Jeroen Leenarts:

Hi, and welcome to the 77th episode of my podcast. My name is Sheila Leenarts. And I've been developing software for over 20 years developing iOS apps for over 10 years. And I'm running flashcards for over nine years, you can find me online under the handle app Force One, just look for it. Wherever you are at, probably you will find me. If you're an iOS app developer, you should listen to my podcast because it will keep you updated on interesting articles, conferences and events you might not have heard about. In this episode, I'm going to talk about the difference between checked and unsafe continuations in Swift, correctly playing audio in iOS applications using Doxie on GitHub Pages, async throwing stream and async stream explained with code examples. And I was seen delegates and external screens. So let's get started. Hey, welcome back to another episode of our podcast. I'm sitting here in a quiet house. Finally, my kids have school vacation, so they're at home. But my wife and a family friend took them out on a day trip. So first time in about a week's time that it's like peace and quiet in the house. So the moment that happens, total body relaxation experience. So that was awesome. And that concludes the ASMR section of my podcast, working hard on all kinds of conferences and things. I don't know of any conferences at the moment that I haven't seen yet in the next six months, about iOS or Apple technologies, specifically, that I haven't thought about of getting sponsored through my place of work. So the workloads on my team at stream is getting so high with in person defense that we're now asking developers within the development team to go out and represent the product and the company, which is fun, which is good. It's not at first one podcast related, but still, it's it's part of my day to day. And it's just a whole lot of fun to get to basically send people out there to in person events and see them have the in person experience again, talking about in person experience on June 15, the caca hats will be at my place of work in Amsterdam. So if you're around, make sure to sign up on meetup.com at the Coker Hudson l meetup on June 15. Because it's it's a whole a whole new level of awesome with this meetup going on. And I just look so much forward to meeting people I know, online, and people who I haven't seen for like two years to see them back in person again, in the office in Amsterdam. So if you're around, make sure that you join tomorrow, it's going to be Kings Day. So the national holiday because our king in the Netherlands is having his birthday. It's not his actual birthday, I think. But still, we have a day off with the entire country. And if you are in the Netherlands, and you have never been in the Netherlands on Kings Day, prepare yourself. If you're curious, look it up online, Kingston Netherlands and be amazed with the whole sea of orange with people that you will see in all these pictures. So have some fun, and hopefully back to work on Thursday again, in the Netherlands without too much of a hangover. So the first article of this week is by Dani waltz the difference between checks and unsafe continuations in Swift. When you're writing a conversion layer to transform your callback based code into code that supports async await in Swift, you will typically find yourself using continuations. A continuation is a closure that you can call with the result of your asynchronous work, you have the option to pass it the output of your work an object that conforms to error, or you can posit a result or objects in his post done you won't go in depth on showing how you can convert your callback based code to async await. He has another post on that. Instead he wants to explain the difference between checked and unsafe continuation in his short post. The next article of this week is by Igor Kumar, correctly playing audio and iOS applications. When you look for ways to play audio in your iOS applications, you usually find code like this AV audio player gets created you prepare to play and you pray you hit play. While this code works, and it will play the given audio file. It does not deal with all the nuances of audio playback. Imagine the user is playing a podcast or some music do you want to sound in your app to stop that playback or play over it? The key to correct audio playback according to Igor is using AV audio session. In his article he will go into some detail and by example, showcase why you should be using AV audio session instead of AV audio player. An audio session gives you a lot more flexibility. Flexibility comes with some complexity. But if you look at this article by Igor you will know that the complexity is not that bad yet because we're not like deep dive in your low level code yet for audio playback. There are some options that you have with AV audio session and Igor goes into some detail on what these are like ducking audio or playing over existing art You're stopping existing audio and the cleanup that you need to do afterwards. So good rates, interesting thing to have a look at, especially if you want to do some audio things within your app. So have a read through this article. So the next article is by Jesse Squires. He wrote some content before on using Doxie on GitHub pages, or maybe more than it was not working for him. But in this article, since there were some updates in INDOXXI. He revisits the topic. And yeah, goes over the things that he likes and he doesn't like about using Doxie. For his documentation generation based on gold level Commons biggest gripe that he has with Doxie is the URL scheme that Doxie imposes on your documentation sites. It's it's pretty elaborate what you need to navigate to form a URL, but still, it works. But another big thing is that Doxie generation is not stable Doxie is great, but there are still some rough edges there that we are waiting for some fixes to get that sorted. Also do note Doxie is an open source project. So if you have some insights into these topics, you can just fix it yourself. The fourth article is by Antoine formulae async drone stream and async stream explained with code examples async drone stream and async stream are part of the concurrency framework introduced in Swift 5.5 With Sae 314 async streams allow you to replace existing code that is based on closures or combined publishers. In his article Antoine goes to some detail what an async Truong stream and an async stream is. But as Antoine always does, teaching is best done by example. So he quickly goes into some sample code and explains what the sample code does. And why should actually be looking at async trunk stream and async stream. Because async trunk stream and async stream are great ways to rewrite existing code based on closures to async await supporting alternatives. You can deliver a continuous stream of files and finish the stream on success or failure. You can iterate values on the implementation level using a for loop based on the async sequence queue API's even. And then the final article I wanted to mention this week is by Keith Harrison usual love.com. iOS seen delegates and external screens. This is a very interesting niche that's actually possible with iOS devices. Because you can show content on an external screen, it's nothing new. The notification notifications that tell you someone has connected or disconnected screen have been in iOS since iOS 3.2. So that's a long while, over 10 years, but a lot has changed since the beginning days of iOS 3.2. Since iOS 13. You have seen delegates and an Irish 14 Swift UI gains new app lifecycle events. So how do you work with external screens in a modern iOS application. To get things going, Keith goes into some detail on how you get started with external screens using UI kits. And the whole point of this application is to just enter some text and show that on an external screen. The default implementation of a UI Kit project provides both an app delegates and the scene delegates. And default scene configuration in the info P list sets the class for the scene delegates and the name of storyboard used to load the main user interface. So all very nice, what you then need to do is add some code to be able to add an external screen to make sure that you can actually put content on this external screen, do some plumbing, do some work. And then finally, you can put the external screen in practice. And it's good to know that the simulator also has support for external displays. In the I O menu, use the external displays menu to choose the size of the external display you want to simulate. So one thing to note about Swift UI is that Apple added new lifecycle events to iOS 14 In regards to external displays. But what it didn't add is any direct support for creating a scene for an external display. So that means you need to fall back to UI kit and seeing delegates to get something displaying on an external screen. Keith promises to look into this more and see if there's any way that he can solve this issue with a pure swift UI based product solution. So that's it for this week, five articles nice and sweet. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at app Force One, either DM or within the app mentioned. And yeah, just make sure that you like subscribe to my podcast in the podcast player of choice. And if you have the opportunity, please review me on Apple podcast. It really helps me a lot and yeah, especially if it's if you'd like for podcasts high reviews is greatly appreciated. If you don't like it, I'm gonna try to have that should reach out to me directly, of course, because yeah, I just like to know how I could potentially improve my podcast for you as a listener. Talk to you again next week, and enjoy the rest of your week.