Time constraints are big the last couple weeks

In this episode, I’m going to talk about:

• Introducing Rollouts by Runway
• A menu bar only macOS app using AppKit
• How to check for network connection and present an alert in SwiftUI
• Understanding different cache policies when working with URLRequest in Swift
• Handling never finishing async functions in Swift package tests
• How to Get Push Notification while iOS App is in Foreground

Don’t forget, you can buy me a coffee. Marco Eidinger did just that, buy me a coffee. Thanks a lot Marco.

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Transcript

Welcome to AppForce1 episode 95. 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:

Introducing Rollouts by RunwayA menu bar only macOS app using AppKitHow to check for network connection and present an alert in SwiftUIUnderstanding different cache policies when working with URLRequest in SwiftHandling never finishing async functions in Swift package testsHow to Get Push Notification while iOS App is in Foreground

Next week it is time for Do iOS. Looking forward to it, when we started discussing running another Do iOS with the team at CocoaHeadsNL, we did not excpect it to get the reception we had. Tickets were trickling out and all of a sudden everything was sold in just 2 days. It really showed us we should get started earlier next year and go way bigger. But lets get through next week first and then look into if and what to do next year.

This week Amos and I will make an appearance in a livestream by iOS Dev Tools. Curious to see how it turns our. The recording will be shared later. Keep an eye on my Twitter to learn more about this when the details become available.

The beginning of November marks me working with Stream for a year. A pretty uneventful thing, but nonetheless I am very happy to share I will be with Stream for atleast another year. During my 1st year at Stream I got two promotions even. But most important, my teams at Stream had a lot of fun while doing excellent work. With a bit launch looming, more on that soon, I hope we will end the year 2022 with a huge bang.

Speaking about things to be happy about. I've been doing this podcast for over 2 years now. This very episode will be recording 199 on my feed. Just doing the maths on this is kind of mind boggling if you ask me. Excliding this episode I am already looking at over 105 hours of spoken content I created in the last 2 years. I did not expect that when I got started. You miht have noticed I slowed down a lot on the interview style episodes, it has to do with time and planning. I want to be available for my family as well and I've noticed my podcast, since it is not my income was just taking too much time away from my family life. Everything podcast is stuff I do in my spare time, and spare time is a scarce resource.

Especially since my daughter was recently selected to get a weekly training in the talent program of the Dutch Gymnastics association. She now trains 5 times a week, and she's only 7. Crazy if I think about it, but also it is what she wants to do. My wife and I keep a close eye on Lisa's wellbeing. And if we would stop her from pursuiing her gymnastics dream, that would not go over well with her. This does not mean she will become the next Dutch gymnastics champion, getting there is a long way to go. Her chances right now, maybe 1 percent? Probably less.

Let's dive into this week's set of articles. I had a hard time making the cut, so much good content this week.

To kick things off I'd like to share a recent announcement by Runway, my year long sponsor. They did a big update to their product.

Introducing Rollouts by Runway

Rollouts is a key next step in furthering Runway’s mission of helping mobile teams build and ship better products, more collaboratively, and they’re excited for everyone to try it out! Let them know what you think, and feel free to reach out to Runway for a personalized, guided tour!Rollouts, a new part of the Runway platform that helps you navigate App rollouts with less collective stress, and more confidence.Runway's Rollouts allows your team to easily keep tabs on release health in just one place instead of many, alerts you whenever configured metrics become unhealthy, and safeguards release health by automatically halting rollouts based on thresholds you define.Rollouts by Runway: a single source of truth for release health, instantly understandable – and actionable

Pol has an article on

A menu bar only macOS app using AppKit

This week Pol has started a journey to develop and (maybe 😅) release his first ever macOS application. It will be a menu bar app, called Shush 🤫, which will allow users to mute all their computer's input devices using CoreAudio.In the following sections, I will go through what my initial steps were to create a menu bar app with no dock icon, with code examples and the reasoning behind my decisions.

Note that there are other amazing resources on the topic such as Mohammad Azam's or Florian Schweizer's videos. I would recommend you go watch them as they do a great job of explaining how a macOS menu bar is set up. I thought I would still write my own article on the topic as a reference for my future self and because I have implemented things slightly differently by using entirely AppKit.

Danijela wrote about

How to check for network connection and present an alert in SwiftUI

Most apps use some type of networking in their code. Whether you're handling user accounts or fetching data from a remote server, you need to handle network connection issues gracefully. Not just making sure your app doesn't crash with a fatal error, but displaying a proper information back to the user.To check for and react to any changes in network connectivity you can use the NWPathMonitor observer from the Network framework. You can initialize the path monitor with different properties, such as specifying the type of connection (wifi, cellular...) or whether it's restricted by low data. You can check the official documentation for more information.

Next up is Natasha with an interesting read about how to

Understanding different cache policies when working with URLRequest in Swift

When in comes to server communication in iOS, the system provides different caching strategies to improve performance and reduce network traffic.By choosing a cache policy, we can decide whether the caching should depend on expiration dates or disabled entirely or whether the server should be contacted to determine if the content has changed since the last request.

Toomas writes about

Handling never finishing async functions in Swift package tests

Imagine, you are at your desk

Why does my CI never finish and post a message to the merge request? Logged in to CI and oh, my merge job had been running for 23 minutes already, although typically it finishes in 4 minutes. What was going on? Nothing else than on unit-test marked with async was still waiting for an async function to finish. So what can we to avoid this?

How to Get Push Notification while iOS App is in Foreground

Before iOS 10, if a notification arrived while an app was in the foreground, the system would silence that notification.Apple thinks the default notification banner is redundant since a user is already in the app.They want us to update our app's interface directly. For example, if a new message arrives, you need to update the badge count in your tab bar.Since iOS 10, Apple has become less opinionated about this behavior and allows us to decide whether to

• Silence the incoming notification (the same behavior as before iOS 10) orTell the system to 

continue to display the notification interface

Sarun explains how to do the second option, more in his article.

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 is in the shownotes. Marco Eidinger did just that, buy me a coffee. Thanks a lot Marco.