Code

I’m updating Steadfast for the new Series 4 watch complications:

• This is a fantastic card library and I’m using it in the new version for onboarding: GitHub - alexaubry/BulletinBoard: General-purpose contextual cards for iOS
• Using multicolour CLKTextProvider in Swift in watchOS 5 - not as straightforward as you might think, but this explains all.

Food

I have travelled so, so much this autumn, which has been awesome obviously, but has now left me at the point where I can be found lovingly stroking my home washing machine with sheer gratitude. I have lately been entirely a consumer of food, rather than a provider. Some standouts:

• Trust’s Chicken Liver Mousse, San Diego
• This Riesling, discovered at Edson Hill, Stowe, Vermont
• The raspberry pecan cornmeal pancakes at Cafe Heaven, Provincetown, Cape Cod [insert long walk on the beach here] and the dinner at Victor’s

Lifting

Hiking at altitude and road trips have kinda stalled my squat progress 😅. Cannot wait to get back in the gym and start working again, but in the meantime I’ve been doing lots of ROMWOD after dinner, weights and bands at home when I can, and abs inspired by Queen Whitney. (Fitspo instas get a lot of flak, but her stuff is, as advertised, hot fire flames 🔥).

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Coding

A mostly maintenance week in code – to be honest, I’m waiting for WWDC to see which of my app ideas might get sherlocked, before committing too much time into a new project. In the meantime, I’ve been doing things like:

• Moving my main blog to use https – I use the Hugo static site framework, which is then deployed by Netlify. I can’t say enough good things about the Netlify service, just the latest of which is one-click Let’s Encrypt certificate generation.
• Thinking about which frameworks I can extract from other projects and finally, really finally, grokking git submodules and Carthage:
  • Dependency Management Using Git Submodules
  • Carthage Tutorial: Getting Started
  • Git submodules: Specify a branch/tag - Stack Overflow
• I was so thoroughly burned by Cocoapods as an inexperienced developer a few years ago, that I’ve avoided Xcode workspaces like the plague ever since. But they are perfect for one of my projects: both the main app and the CoreData -> CloudKit code are in active development, but in different git repos. Using one workspace for both projects means that Xcode’s source control management still works seamlessly, and the built frameworks are just magically available. Once the cloud framework is finished and stable, I can think about using Carthage or a submodule to manage the app’s dependency, but for this parallel development situation, I’m loving the workspace.
• Coding & music & design in an app development podcast: App Dev Diary
• Really getting into using Swift’s keypaths now, thanks to Point-free and Swift Talk. This article also helped: Swift 4 KeyPaths and You - klundberg.com
• The ObjectIdentifier type was totally new to me: Identifying objects in Swift — Swift by Sundell

Baking

If you are ever faced with a jar of nut butter to use up, or like me, you fear you might go through the whole thing standing in front of the fridge with a spoon, you now know what to do: Ottolenghi’s tahini cookies in grams or in cups — I’ve made them with tahini, almond and cashew butters, and they are delicious whatever. You can also sub a little espresso powder or cocoa for flour if you like. I cook them for a bit longer than suggested though - 25 minutes until nicely browned.

Coding etc.

Two recommendations and two self-plugs this week:

• If you need to generate automatic wallpapers for test phones and watches, this article and utility from _David Smith will show you how Generating Testing Device Wallpapers - David Smith, Independent iOS Developer But if you just need to get some random text on a watch or iOS device, you could download my free app Steadfast. It’s super simple - it just lets you put a text phrase on a complication, including the extra large face, but it’s live updating so you don’t need to do the Share -> Watch Face dance. I use it for a sort of personal mantra — it can be quite nice for my tiny monkey brain to have that gentle reminder to keep a long-term goal in mind. But you could equally use it to display “Testing v2.4.3.45.345” or whatevs. There’s also a Swift easter egg 🦄💖.

• I have been loving Swift Talk’s series on building a settings form library. And when I say loving, I mean following along in code, extending it and then having to take long adoring coffee breaks where I stare at the framework api thinking how beautiful it is 🤓. In the middle of all the refactoring I’ve been using my Xcode source code extension AccessControlKitty, which takes a selection of Swift code and changes the access level. So, for example, you could make a class public, including all its methods and variables, with one menu command (or keystroke). It’s pretty handy 😽.

Random

• Makes me wish I could still run. I’m terrible, but there’s nothing like that feeling. Failing to run – Richard Ramsden – Medium
• Get your new daily mantra here: I Think About When Barbara Kruger Dragged Supreme a Lot , via an awesome person with a private twitter account, you know who you are, thanks.

Sunday reading 💻

Not much coding this week because I was in NYC for the week, going from three hours on a freezing building site in overcoat, hat and scarf on Monday, to Wednesday’s clothing-optional pavement melter. Packing difficulty level: extreme.

Coding etc.

• Khanlou - Infinite Collections
• Strongly typed access to Info.plist and .plist files in Swift
• Darts, Dice, and Coins via mikeash.com: Friday Q&A 2018-04-27: Generating Text With Markov Chains in Swift

Art

• It’s the last day of Frieze New York today: my favourite stand – a non-controversial but uncontested choice – had to be Tracey Emin at Xavier Hufkens.
• Right at the other end of the price spectrum I’m really loving work by Hiejin Yoo (@hiejin_yoo) these days.
• And somewhere in the middle, the clean, fun, graphic canvases by Math Bass at Mary Boone, until July.
• Short shorts and bell bottoms. Some wonderful photos here, taken by NYT reporters on strike - I’m gutted I missed this exhibition in person. Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 - The New York Times, until mid June in Central Park.

Random

• You have no idea how much I love these: Toast It Coasters

Sunday reading 💻

Coding etc.

• UIViewController 👏 does 👏 not 👏 need 👏 to 👏 fill 👏 the 👏 screen, and many more important reminders: Dave DeLong - A Better MVC - YouTube
• NSPredicate Cheatsheet
• Great podcast I’m now binging my way through about being an iOS indie dev. Not sure why I never got to it before given my truly ridiculous podcast feed. Helpful, informative, lovely people: Independence
• A listicle genuinely worthy of your time, especially if you’re like me and occasionally want to throw the iPad out of the window whilst screaming “all I want is a windowing os” to those below: 11 Tips for Working on the iPad – MacStories
• Airport reading from yesterday was the delightfully written Codable book from Flight School. I posted this on twitter but it’s too good a quote to not repeat here:

  Every metadata or userInfo property is a compromise between correctness, completeness, and flexibility — an escape hatch for unthinkable use cases; a concession to one’s own hubris.

• Next week’s airport reading sorted: Xcode Treasures Now Available - Time.code()
• UILayoutGuide – The Traveled iOS Developer’s Guide – Medium

Random

• Infinitesimal Odds: A Scientist Finds Her Child’s Rare Illness Stems From the Gene She Studies - The New York Times
• I cannot get those toppings out of my head: How a Frozen Pizza Brand Became Norway’s Unofficial National Dish - Gastro Obscura
• Bodybuilding: I’m loving 👸 Erin Stern’s recent videos about her latest figure prep. The workouts are worth watching for some really useful cuing, and as she’s self-coached she has a lot of sensible tips about visualization to help with the mental side.

Xcode extensions

I wanted write a little Xcode extension that could change the access level of a selection – for example, make an internal class and all its properties and functions public just with a keystroke. I thought it would be handy for extracting code into separate modules. I sort of forgot that now I need to write a lexer and a parser and a syntax tree and, well, it’s a whole thing. Fun though.

• GitHub - theswiftdev/awesome-xcode-extensions: Awesome native Xcode extensions.
• Install Xcode 8 Source Editor Extension – Khoa Pham – Medium
• GitHub - yanagiba/swift-ast: A Swift AST parser and visitor that is written in Swift.
• Building a Compiler in Swift with LLVM, Part 1: Introduction and the Lexer - Harlan Haskins
• Writing a lexer in Swift
• LLVM Tutorial: Table of Contents — LLVM 7 documentation

Random

• Not exactly my ideal job fit: The Quarterback of the Kitchen? It’s Not Always the Chef - The New York Times
• Shut up and let me throw this money at you: Former Apple designer makes a coffee grinder

Swift etc.

• API design and implementation leakiness: What Color is Your Function?)
• Hide state that doesn’t need to be mutable after initialization: Using the builder pattern in Swift — Swift by Sundell
• Just say no? Activist Engineering · Matthew Bischoff
• A handy extension to simplify dealing with empty or nil collections: Optional Emptiness - Indie Stack
• Post-build script to clean up and manage localized strings Clean iOS Localizable Files – Building VTS
• Making illegal states unrepresentable – Ole Begemann
• Decoding Dictionaries in Swift
• GitHub - tattn/MoreCodable: MoreCodable expands the possibilities of Codable.
• Challenges of Supporting iPhone X - Inside PSPDFKit
• Stick in an extension, never google again: NSBundle.current - ⎋ bou.io
• Multidimensional Snapshot Testing - Originate Developer Blog
• Daniel Kennett - App Store Subscriptions And You
• Name for the result, not how you got there: Why you should not name your @IBActions didTapButton

Random

• Notes on Resonance

Shoutout to Mike Ash’s mini protocol for checking whether the type you’re dealing with is an optional with a nil value. Handy for generic functions when you’re not sure whether you’ve been passed a straight value, or a value wrapped in an optional:

private protocol OptionalP {
    var isNil: Bool { get }
}

extension Optional: OptionalP {
    var isNil: Bool { return self == nil }
}

switch aValueOfSomeType {
case let anOptional = aValueOfSomeType as? OptionalP where anOptional.isNil: 
// ladies and gentlemen, this value is wrapped in an Optional and is nil 
…

This protocol is from his implementation of type safe user defaults, worth checking out in itself, obviously.

I wake up about 45 minutes too early so I’ve started using @Headspace most mornings: it’s a hack to not wake my husband making coffee, and I add to a streak. (I worry it’s not meditation if you pass out, but a nice bloke tells me to just note the worry and move on…)

Pretty sure this will be my last iPad for a while. It’s always in a logitech keyboard case (I’m a 🦕 and need shortcuts), and the only app that isn’t genuinely a worse implementation of Mac/web is Zara’s shopping app. Which I should quit anyway (see 🦕).

Today’s swift & coffee: Ben Scheirman - quick thoughts on quality code, coordinators and mvC - really like the idea of extending the responder chain to get app events up and through “wrapper” VCs that shouldn’t have anything to do with the data in question. ☕️👩‍💻

Spent most of the morning trying to deploy a Hugo site on github with Wercker. Should have just thrown my wallet at squarespace. 🤦‍♀️

Today’s coding video + cappuccino: Joe Groff with ideas on where Swift could take reflection 💻☕️

The objc.io Core Data book is updated for Swift 4 and has a whole amazing chapter on remote (CloudKit) syncing strategies with sample project. Still makes me want to cry into my oatmeal but v slightly less than yesterday.

Feels like 1 Jan is the perfect day to tackle setting up CloudKit, syncing, local caching and conflict resolution. Wish me luck 😱

Happy new year everyone! I spent mine baking bread and sharpening knives, seems as good a metaphor as any 🥂

Spending the morning knee deep in rendered pixels, scaling and perspective wallpaper for Steadfast’s iPhone X update