OrchardNest

Since way back in iOS 2.0, the venerable Formatter class and its derivations such as DateFormatter and NumberFormatter have been the go-to for converting values to and from strings. Over the years Apple has added other cool formatters such...

If you’ve been programming for any length of time, you’ll likely run across apps or other projects that need major work and revisions to keep going. Maybe your company acquired another company with tons of legacy code. Perhaps...

WWDC 2021 is behind us and there are so many new and exciting features available to us as developers. One of those areas that has been getting much more love from Apple over the last few years is accessibility. Apple has been making it...

In my last post, I looked at handling diffable data sources with different types of object data, focusing primarily on the venerable UITableView for my examples. We looked at a simple if...else construct to swap between cell types based on...

Since iOS 13, we’ve been able to revamp the way our table and collection views work by using diffable data source classes (UITableViewDiffableDataSource and UICollectionViewDiffableDataSource respectively) and snapshots. This...

One of the nice new features that came out with iOS 14 were some new options around the venerable UIDatePicker. There are now some choices other than just the slot machine-style wheels! Since iOS 2.0, the original style of UIDatePicker has...

If you’ve been doing any sort of app development with iconography since iOS 13 came out, there’s a good chance you leveraged the original SF Symbols app. With around 1,600 scalable, vector-based symbols integrating with the...

If you’ve been doing any kind of file uploads, downloads, previews, and such in past versions of Xcode and needed to deal with MIME types or file extensions, you’ve probably had to deal with Uniform Type Identifers. Using...

Prior to macOS 11 Big Sur, cleaning up development disk space by deleting old iOS or watchOS device support versions and Xcode caches was something of a pain, requiring command-line calls to directories scattered in a number of different...

As expected, there was so much goodness in WWDC 2020 last week. From exciting new software changes in Swift UI, collection views, and much more to the anticipated move away from Intel to Apple Silicon, there was something exciting for just...

Just some quick and simple Swift stuff in this post around writing cleaner code. It’s pretty common to see a pattern like the following in existing code when evaluating enumerations. While the above code works, it’s also not...

If you’ve ever distributed an app to the Apple App Store, you’ve probably generated an iOS Distribution certificate (either from Xcode or directly from the Apple Developer site. With Xcode 11, Apple released new Development and...

Last time we took a look at the very useful RelativeDateTimeFormatter to create localized strings describing date differences programmatically. In this post we’ll look at a better way to handle presenting lists to your users. As...

Prior to iOS 13, converting a date from the Date object to a nicely formatted string such as “10 days ago” or “next month” required a lot of custom coding or maybe third-party libraries to manage the conversion. The...

With iOS 13, Apple finally made some long overdue changes to support more effective customizations of the tab bars, and tool bars in your apps. The new UITabBarAppearance, UIBarAppearance, and related classes lets developers easily modify...