Author: Andrew Jaffee

Avid and well-published author, software engineer, designer, and developer, now specializing in iOS mobile app development in Objective-C and Swift, but with a strong background in C#, C++, .NET, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, Agile, Test Driven Development, Git, Continuous Integration, Responsive Web Design, blah, blah, blah ... Did I miss any fad-based catch phrases? My brain avatar was kindly provided by https://icons8.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift: Advanced Applications

The original article – Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift: Is it better than Object Oriented Programming? – was published on appcoda.com.

Introduction

We’re going to talk in-depth about protocol-oriented programming (POP) using Swift 4 in this article. This post is the second and final article in a two part series. If you haven’t read the first, introductory article, please do so before continuing onwards. Today, we’ll: discuss why Swift is considered a “protocol-oriented” language, compare POP and object-oriented programming (OOP), compare value semantics and reference semantics, consider local reasoning, implement delegation with protocols, use protocols as types, use protocol polymorphism, review my real-world POP Swift code, and finally, discuss why I’ve not bought 100% into POP. Download the source code from the article so you can follow along: There are 2 playgrounds and one project on GitHub, both in Xcode 9 format and written in Swift 4.

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Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift: An Introduction

My original article — Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift: An Introduction — was published on appcoda.com.

(The second and final installment of this series is now available.)

The greatest enemy of software developers is complexity, so when I hear about new technologies promising to help me manage chaos, I listen. One of the “hot” methodologies generating much attention recently (at least since 2015) is “protocol-oriented programming” (POP) in Swift. We’ll use Swift 4 herein. While writing my own code, I’ve found POP to be promising. What’s very intriguing is Apple’s assertion that “at its heart, Swift is protocol-oriented.” I’d like to share my experiences with POP in a formal presentation, a clear and concise tutorial on this up-and-coming technology. I’ll explain the key concepts, provide plenty of code samples, make the inevitable comparison between POP and object-oriented programming (OOP), and pour cold water on the fad-oriented programming (FOP?) crowds’ claim that POP is a magic bullet solution to everything.

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Concurrency in iOS: serial and concurrent queues in Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) with Swift 4

Today, I’ll show you how to use Swift 4 and the Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) application programming interface (API) to implement the execution of (multiple) tasks in the background, i.e., parallel/concurrent execution of tasks on a multicore CPU. I’ve built a sample app that gives you two options: 1) synchronous execution of tasks in the background and 2) asynchronous execution of tasks in the background. All my Swift 4 code from this article, part of an Xcode 9 project which builds a fully-functional working sample app, is available for download here. Join me in: reviewing concurrent programming concepts; reviewing my concurrent Swift 4 code; and, examining videos of my app in action, videos of console output from my app, and the console output text itself. I’ll even show you how to graphically visualize my app’s CPU and thread usage with Xcode’s Debug Navigator.

This is a look at the app — a snapshot — after all images have finished downloading asynchronously in the background:

Here’s a video of the app downloading images asynchronously in the background:

Press the play button if you missed the first showing

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Concurrency in iOS: Introduction to the abstract Operation class and using its BlockOperation subclass to run tasks in parallel

[Download the full Xcode 9 project, written in Swift 4, from GitHub.]

Swift tutorials by iosbrain.comI’m going to introduce you to iOS concurrency with simple Swift 4 code that uses an API based on the Operation abstract class. In more complex scenarios, you would subclass and customize Operation, but iOS provides the built-in BlockOperation subclass of Operation which we’ll use here. I’ll review the tenets of concurrency, emphasize why it is necessary in almost all apps, explain the basic infrastructure of Operation, compare it to Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), and then walk you through the Swift 4 code I wrote to implement concurrency in a real-live app based on BlockOperation. I’ll even show you how to graphically visualize your app’s CPU and thread usage with Xcode’s Debug Navigator. Here’s the app that we’ll build together:

Press the play button if you missed the first showing

We now live in the day and age of writing apps that can run on devices with CPUs that have multiple cores. We can go way beyond the notion of “multitasking” as a bunch of processes vying for a “timeslice” of the CPU. We can literally run processes simultaneously on different cores. As iOS developers, it is vitally important that we understand the concept of concurrency. Why?

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Downloading and installing an old version of OS X (mac OS) on your Mac

We’re going to talk about installing a version of your Mac’s operating system (OS), known as “macOS” or “OS X,” on your Mac, older than the one you’re currently running, on a partition of your primary hard drive or on an external hard drive. You may find that your current instance of OS X is too unstable for normal day-to-day usage or more heavy-duty tasks like development. Remember all the problems people had when they upgraded to OS X 10.13, also known as “High Sierra?” Oy, vey. You might have been like “Get me the heck outta Dodge!” You wanted or needed to get back to a stable OS, like Sierra (OS X 10.12) or El Capitan (OS X 10.11). For developers, you may have to install an older version of Xcode not supported by your latest OS. For Cocoa/macOS developers, you may need to make absolutely sure that your desktop apps are backward compatible, and the only way to do that for sure is to install and run your apps on older versions of macOS. I will show you, step by step, how to get a valid copy of an older version of macOS, make a bootable installer disk, and install the old OS.

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Xcode: using the “Debug executable” checkbox to step through app release versions

Here’s an Xcode setting, but what does it do for developers?

There’s a checkbox named “Debug executable” on the “Info” pane for Xcode’s “Debugging Options in the Scheme Editor.” Why is there such a dearth of information on this checkbox, a “simple” Xcode scheme option? Apple has little to say about the feature. Information about it is scarce on the web. I’ve heard all sorts of different opinions about what the checkbox does or doesn’t do. (Some of this may be exacerbated by Apple releasing buggy versions of Xcode.)

I’ll discover and explain, using the scientific method, how the “Debug executable” checkbox works. You may be thinking this is much ado about one checkbox, but my purpose is to get you to think about and learn a lot about debugging with Xcode. The absolute best developers are the ones with great and instinctive debugging, nay, TROUBLESHOOTING, skills.

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Swift 4 property observers: responding to changes in property values and managing state

Swift tutorials by iosbrain.comWe’re going to learn about a feature of Swift called “property observers” that help developers manage app state. You can easily add code to monitor changes to Swift native type property values as well as your own custom type property values. Remember that you can gain insight into an application by looking at its state: the data values stored in all properties of the app at a specific point in time. Getting a grip on app state, therefore managing complexity, is one of the biggest challenges in computer science. Property observers are one technology that help you get a grip. In today’s article, I’ll explain this Swift feature, demonstrate its usage with runnable examples of Swift code, show you how I built an app which relies on property observers, and provide you a list of other Swift technologies that help you manage app state and complexity. Here’s my sample app in action:

Download the Xcode 9 project and playground, both written in Swift 4, from GitHub so you can follow along with my discussion.

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I’ve started writing iOS tutorials for AppCoda as a freelancer

It is my great honor and privilege to have joined the tutorials team at AppCoda.com as a freelancer. My first tutorial, “Swift 4 Generics: How to Apply Them in Your Code and iOS Apps,” was published yesterday, and was originally published here on my own site at this link. I am looking forward to publishing many more tutorials for you, my most loyal readers, at AppCoda and here on iOSBrain.com. Note: If I cross-post an article on AppCoda and here, the article will appear first on AppCoda. Thank you AppCoda!

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Debugging: symbolicating crash reports manually (stack trace, backtrace)

Swift tutorials by iosbrain.comToday, we’ll talk about manually symbolicating iOS and OS X application “crash reports.” Why? When you hear about a crash in one of your apps from a customer, the first thing you should do is try to get a copy of the crash report. But there are times when you get crash reports that aren’t automatically symbolicated, or that you can’t symbolicate by dragging into Xcode, or are partially symbolicated. When not symbolicated, you’re reading numeric addresses when you want to be reading code, like your function/class names. There are workarounds and we’ll discuss one today. Download the sample Xcode 9 project written in Objective-C to follow along. What’s a crash report, anyway? According to Apple:

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NSNotificationCenter in Swift 4: Intra-app communication, sending, receiving, listening, stop listening for messages

[Download Xcode 9 project with full Swift 4 source from GitHub.]

The topic today is how to communicate between objects within an app, specifically using iOS’s NSNotificationCenter. In the last post, “Tutorial: delegates and delegation in Swift 4,” I used delegation to communicate between two objects. In the code I wrote for the last article, the app’s main (and only) view controller waited to display an image. The image was not included in the app bundle, rather downloaded from a NASA website. I created a class that downloaded the image file. The view controller was informed that the image was finished downloading and ready to display using a technique called “delegation.” Here, we’ll modify the delegation tutorial code to work with NSNotificationCenter instead. The image downloading class will notify the view controller that the image has finished downloading by sending a notification (message).

I will show you: 1) a one-post-to-one-observer notification; and, 2) a broadcast, where one post is received by many observers. Download the project and follow along in Xcode. Here’s the app we’ll build:

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