OrchardNest

This summer marks exactly a decade since I started doing mobile apps development. My first mobile app was called MyTVShows and was released to the Windows Phone Store in summer of 2011. The app solved a practical problem for me, keeping...

If you have your CI machine set up to run multiple jobs in parallel you might have encountered a problem. You cannot run multiple iOS UI tests in the same simulator at the same time. They will fail. The problem Imagine this scenario. You...

In some environments like the CI/CD you might need to read environments variables from your iOS or macOS unit tests. A typical example might be reading secrets or configuration that is CI/CD specific and you do not want to store it in...

I have been working on a macOS application recently where I encountered an interesting task to grey out flags for countries that are disabled. I first tried overlaying a semi-transparent gray view (fun fact, you cannot directly...

I use the same machines to work on both personal and work projects. I usually have to use a different Git identity for the work projects than for my personal projects. Previously I had my personal Git identity set globally and then used...

In a few projects in the past I needed to do web scraping to get some data from websites that did not offer access via an API. I was using C# at the time and scraping web with Html Agility Pack was quite easy. I now spend most of my time...

How many times how you copied and pasted some code in your current codebase because there was no good way to abstract it? Maybe because it was some repeating code required by a framework or mapping of some data transfer structures. Writing...

Have you ever wondered how much time a day you spend waiting for Xcode to do your builds? Working on a project that is almost entirely written in Swift I wonder that every day with a feeling that it is a non-trivial amount of time just...

If you use a hackintosh you have to choose your hardware carefully to make sure it is supported by macOS. You can get Wi-Fi + Bluetooth card used by Apple as I did in my desktop, but sometimes you do not have much choice. When I turned by...

In the iOS application I currently work on the users can choose a video from the device’s gallery and that video gets uploaded to the backend. This functionality has always worked fine but recently somebody tried to upload s slow...

In the last few months I have been working more intensively with MapKit, doing more advanced operations like clustering map annotations or animating annotation position changes. I have encountered a few problem resulting in MKMapView quite...

In the iOS app I currently work on there is a Notification Service Extension and a Share Extension. Both extensions have been implemented quite some time age and have been working fine. Recently I got some bug reports that led to...

Annotations are mainly used to displays static “pins” in MKMapView but sometimes you might need to make them move and animate their position changes so it looks better to the users. There are a few things you need to do to...

If you need to display many annotations in your MKMapView it is recommended to cluster them for better performance. Map clustering This means instead of showing all the visible annotations you group annotations that are close together into...

If you want to display completely custom views as “pins” on the map in your iOS application, you should use annotations. All your data needs to be represented as objects conforming to the MKAnnotation protocol, with title,...

I often use fatalerror(message:) in my code base to deal with invalid states when the application cannot continue. A typical example can be a method that requires to be called only after the user has logged in: guard let loggedUser =...

If you have already updated to Xcode 11.4 that ships with Swift 5.2 you might have noticed that your Swift scripts all started crashing when accessing anything related to URL. I use a script to generate a list of libraries used in the app...

Apple has deprecated UIWebView and will not be accepting new apps with UIWebView starting April 2020 and app updates with UIWebView starting December 2020. If your app uses UIWebView you should replace it with WKWebView. The check for...

As an iOS developer you need to periodically update your Xcode, on your own machine and on your CI/CD server if you automate your development workflow. There are multiple ways to do this so do not waste your time and use the fastest way...

When developing an iOS application you might get into a situation when you need to change the UIApplication base class. It is often a requirement when using various MDM SDKs, like the Mobile Iron AppConnect SDK. There are two ways to do...

The iOS messaging application I work on features a context menu in the chat. You long-press any message in the chat and the context menu appears. This menu was originally implemented using the standard UIMenuController. The...

If you use the standard iOS UIAlertController to present the user with a list of actions, there is not much you can do about styling each of the UIAlertActions shown. The text of the shown UIAlertAction uses the UIView's tint color, so you...

When I started with my hackintosh I did not have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth support in it. I used Ethernet to connect to my home network and it worked fine, I had no need for Wi-Fi. Later I wanted to use more “Apple-specific” features,...