It is already two weeks since my previous episode. The one I did in the hotel room in Denver. It really feels like a distant memory already. So much stuff happened again in two weeks. My son's bedroom furniture got delivered. He now has a pirate themed bedroom, inclusing a shark desk, ship-bed / bed-ship and a treasure chest. I am not jealous at his room. Nope not at all. You can imagine we are now in a talk-like-a-pirate day streak here at home.
Last week my voice was quite bad, I had a weird cold that was not causing too much discomfort. Except for my voice. It was raspy and if I talked too much I was coughing a lot. Not ideal for a podcast recording. So I decided to skip. I had plenty of other things to do anyway. Like a conference…
I am super excited to announce that for Do iOS on November 8 and 9, tickets are available, we have the first 6 speakers announced.
This week’s articles.
Most important is to go to do-ios.com for all information related to Do iOS. You can also follow the conference on Twitter, it has a very easy twitter handle: iOSConf
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Welcome to AppForce1 episode 90. My name is Jeroen Leenarts and I’ve been developing software for over 20 years, developing iOS apps for over 10 years, running the Dutch CocoaHeads for over 9 years.
If you are an iOS app developer, you should listen to my podcast because I 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:
It is already two weeks since my previous episode. The one I did in the hotel room in Denver. It really feels like a distant memory already. So much stuff happened again in two weeks. My son's bedroom furniture got delivered. He now has a pirate themed bedroom, inclusing a shark desk, ship-bed / bed-ship and a treasure chest. I am not jealous at his room. Nope not at all. You can imagine we are now in a talk-like-a-pirate day streak here at home.
Last week my voice was quite bad, I had a weird cold that was not causing too much discomfort. Except for my voice. It was raspy and if I talked too much I was coughing a lot. Not ideal for a podcast recording. So I decided to skip. I had plenty of other things to do anyway. Like a conference…
I am super excited to announce that for Do iOS on November 8 and 9, tickets are available, we have the first 6 speakers announced.
And there is more awesomeness I know of, that I am sharing later.
Tickets run at 175 euros plus a few percent ticket handling. As a hotel, best option is the Student Hotel Amsterdam City. It should cost you about 150 euros, is right on top of the venue and has a nice subway connection allowing easy access from the airport and the city center.
Buy your ticket as soon as possible. Because each ticket sold allows us to invest right back into the conference. Our goal is to do an awesome event, while staying nett positive at all times.
The Do iOS conference is organized by the non-profit Stichting Cocoaheads. That's CocoaHeadsNL for short. While I currently run most things in the lead up, it is actually Marco, Jolanda and Bart who are involved behind the scenes. Especially during the conference itself.
Another super exciting bit of information I can share is SwiftLeeds on October 20th, still some tickets available I think. Stefan, Pol and me will be there. Hi Adam. I look forward to seeing you and all other people in attendance soon.
Anyways, lots of things to check out. Most important is to go to do-ios.com for all information related to Do iOS. You can also follow the conference on Twitter, it has a very easy twitter handle: iOSConf
The first article of this week is a nice one about generating documentation for command-line tools. It is by Marco Eidinger.
Generate a man page for a Swift command-line tool
This blog post will teach you how to generate a manual page for your Swift command-line tool using Apple's swift-argument-parser. Marco will also teach you how to ensure that the man page will be installed along your command-line tool.
Marin Todorov created a neat Mardown based libary. He wrote about it in a blog called:
Introducing MarkCodable
MarkCodable encodes Codable values as Markdown text and decodes Markdown strings as Swift values. Markdown-representation allows humans to easily edit values by hand using their favorite text editor on any operating system or in a web interface.
Leonardo has an interesting piece…
Exploring SwiftUI Redraw Behavior with Instruments
He uses Instruments to know how a simple app is evaluated by SwiftUI's view redraw. You will see @ObservedObject will always invalidate the view if one of its properties changes even if the properties are not used in that specific view. There is more in his article. It is a neat exploration of some internals of how SwiftUI works.
Antoine van der Lee has two articles this time. Both about accessibility.
Accessibility in SwiftUI explained for UIKit developers
Adding accessibility support in SwiftUI will be more approachable for you compared to UIKit. But still, if you’ve been sharpening your UIKit skills for years, it takes a while to get your head around the new declarative/reactive way of doing things. It is an entirely different mental model, and it takes some getting used to. You may have a good understanding of how to make UIKit apps accessible while struggling to do the same in SwiftUI.
The second article is titled:
VoiceOver navigation improvement tips for SwiftUI apps
VoiceOver navigation support in your apps comes with the same requirements as navigating through touch controls. When navigating apps with standard touch controls, we tend to dislike apps that feel cluttered or make us do many interactions to achieve something. We’d probably say such an app does not offer a good user experience. The same principles apply when using VoiceOver (and other assistive technologies). You want to achieve your goal with a minimum number of interactions, and you want the app to give you the necessary context concisely and cleanly as you need it.
The next article is by Rens Breur.
The SwiftUI render loop
Just like UIKit, SwiftUI is implemented on top of an event loop that dispatches messages to your UI code. The UI code in turn may trigger parts of the screen to be re-rendered. The handling of messages and rendering of graphics on screen form the render loop of an application. All UI frameworks are based on a render loop, in SwiftUI it is hidden particularly well. Most of the time, it works under the hood without us needing to know anything about it. It is amazing how we can write UI code without even needing to understand what an event loop is, and without us needing to worry about how often to render screen content. But in some cases, it is useful to know what is happening behind the scenes.
This is a really nice add on to the earlier article by Leonardo. So enjoy.
The final article is by Natasha
How to build a configurable widget with WidgetKit and SwiftUI
In this article, Natasha dives into widgets that display content depending on some user input like their location, their preferences or any other input that allows users to customize their widget.
And that's it again for this week.
If you have any feedback, please send me a message through Twitter. My DMs are open. And don’t forget, you can buy me a coffee. Link for that in the shownotes.
Now go look at Do iOS and maybe get yourself a ticket?