AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers

It feels good being able to travel again

May 02, 2022 Jeroen Leenarts Episode 78
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers
It feels good being able to travel again
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers +
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Show Notes Transcript
Jeroen Leenarts:

Hi, and welcome to the 78th episode of my podcast app. First one. My name is Regina and I've been developing software for over 20 years developing iOS apps for over 10 years, and I'm running into that cocoa has 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 two ways to unit test test Notification Center in Swift, how to code sign on CI along with Xcode, auto sign, quick guides or local notifications for iOS swift UI supporting external screens, and exploring data with Swift tabular data and data frame. I will also mention a couple of meetups happening with the go karts, and share some information about the app DEF CON conference happening in June. So let's get started. So it's been a fun week. Last week, a lot of things happening I've been busy tasking my team members to travel to various conferences, so a lot of details with conferences going on. Also, Michaela Quran did her first YouTube video sponsored by stream and was very fun to see her publish her first tutorial style instruction style video. Yeah, just really nice to see what was also really nice to see was the Swift Community Awards done the poet's definitely have a check on that post by by Paul Hudson because there's some interesting people resources and projects on there that each individually, you should have a look at checkout, so well worth the effort to have a look at. It's the second week of the school ification of my kids, but this week, they're sleeping over a lot with with my parents and my mother in law. So it's a lot easier in the home to deal with everything. And to get everything organized. Also finding some quiet time to do podcast recording is quite easy now. Kids having a school vacation, they tend to get bored at some time, at some point. But I think that's a good thing, right? being bored is yeah, it's time and space that you need to actually start thinking and to start getting up at new ideas to be able to have some fun afterwards again. So yeah, lots of stuff, preparing some conference visits. And yeah, let's just dive into the news articles of this week. So the first article is by Leonardo Maya Puglisi, two ways to unit test Notification Center and swift. In his article, he will go into some detail on how you can actually unit test Notification Center in Swift, because no other Notification Center is a nice, convenient architecture that you can use to disconnect the sources and the recipients of events within your codebase. But the problem can be that it is quite hard to actually unit test this. So in his article laying out, it goes into some details on how you can actually do this with exit tests and activity assert equal statements. And also how you can pretty much architecture code in such a way that it's easier to, to unit test the notification behavior in your code. So it's a it's a fun read. It's a bit of an API that not many people are too familiar with the NS Notification Center. It's been with iOS development right from the start. But I do notice in Swift, that people have a tendency to use more combined based and async based mechanisms to communicate within your applications. But still, Notification Center is an important thing, you cannot escape it, you always have to use it at some point in your code. So definitely worth checking out the article by Leonardo. The next article is called how to code sign on CI along with Xcode auto sign. It's an article by Sam wise. And Xcode has added the imaging feature a couple of years ago to automatically manage signing for you it's a simple checkbox will make that will make your life with Apple's developers portal a lot easier. You don't have to provision profiles anymore manually, right? But there's one issue and that's the continuous integration, continuous deployment environment that you want to have running and building your applications. So how can you do this in a way that it's actually works for your CI CD environment as well? Well, in his article soundwise has some small tips that will actually help you get this done. It's it's actually quite simple. He makes a difference between debug and release builds. Basically, the tip that SEMrush gives is that you have to do manual signing for CI but that you can locally still use automatic signing if you want to. The third article is called quit It guides on local notifications for iOS, by Natasha for diver, learn how to schedule local notification in different ways and how to handle them. It's it's a short rate and a good overview with code samples on how you can use local notifications. So that's the UN user notification center, not the NS notification center that I mentioned in the first article. But it's a way that you can use the UN user notification center to schedule local notification, but also to do the plumbing work beforehand, before you actually are allowed to sketch a local notification within an iOS app. So it's a it's a short rate with lots of code samples that you can immediately use in your code. And just have a look at it. It's just a fun little bit of information that is well worth the read. Then the fourth article is a follow up article by Keith Harrison. It's the follow up article on previous week's article that I shared on supporting external screens in your app in his previous article, Keith basically went into how you can use UI kit to get access to an external screen using a UI Kit interface. In this article, in this week's article, he will go into the details of what you can do with Swift UI only API's. So you will notice within his article that you will run into the limitations that swift UI provides with getting access to an external screen. But it is a good read to have a look at especially compared to the article of last week to see what problems are that you are solving with last week's solution compared to this week's solution. So it basically boils down that Apple needs to make some additions to the Swift UI app lifecycle in iOS 16, to be able to use a full swift UI implementation for supporting an external screen. And then the fifth article is a bit of an outlier. For me. It's called exploring data bits fifth tabular data and data frame by Eric Cullinan. It's actually API that I was myself unaware of. But it is basically API that allows you to to LOAD CSV or JSON format into an object called a data frame, in which you can explore and manipulate this data is basically tabular data rows and columns, like a bit like a database table, but then in memory. But as essentially, Apple has dedicated API for this since iOS 15. So it's an article that goes over to some details. How can you can you load data into a data frame from a CSV file? And what can you then do with the data in this data frame in like querying and manipulating the data, you can also do like typical relational effects like grouping and renaming of columns. And it's an interesting exploration of an API that was very unfamiliar to me. So immediately after this article reading, it's I dove into the tabular data and data frame, API documentation on Apple documentation is sparse, but very, very useful. And I'd know next time I have some sort of tabular data, I know which API to use, provided I have like a deployment target of iOS 15, or better. So that's the final article of this week. I also wanted to do a mention of some coke ads and meetups that are happening in May and in June. So in May, there will be a local meetup on May 18, have a look at the show notes for a link on June 6, that's the WWDC evening, there will be a local viewing party at an hour at the office of q 42. It's going to be a lot of fun as well. And on June 15, there will be a meet up at the office of stream, which will also be live streamed online. And I will be there in person. And I hope to meet some people from the iOS community in the Netherlands again. And if you're international, definitely have a look at joining us on the live stream and watching the presentations that have be done on June 15. The next thing is the final thing really is the app DEF CON conference at DEF CON delta. Now, if you haven't bought tickets yet, have a look at their website. They have an interesting lineup scheduled. They have like the initial batch of speakers published now. And you should definitely check them out. Same goes for all the other conferences that I keep mentioning on Twitter. So that's iOS Dev, UK, Swift comm app builder, ch, Swift, pl, Swift leads and 360 ILF. Probably I'm missing some, like for instance, French kid, but but there's a whole bunch of events going on. Yeah, definitely make sure to check those out. Talk to you again next week. If you have any feedback on my podcast, please let me know I'm just a DM away on Twitter. Or you can just openly mentioned me on Twitter as well. I love getting feedback from anybody listening and I hope to meet you at the conference. Somewhere in worlds soon because it feels good being able to travel

Unknown:

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