William Boles - A blog about iOS development in Swift and Objective-C

In the fairytale 🧚 version of UICollectionView, a cell has a simple view inside it. In the nightmarish reality, a cell sometimes needs to host a UIViewController. Here, we look at how to stuff a UIViewController instance inside a UICollectionViewCell, avoiding various gotchas.

Core Data and Unit Testing haven't always been the best of friends ⚔️. Core Data is all about persisting. Unit testing is all about forgetting. Here, we look at how they can work together with the help of UIKit to ensure that we gain the confidence we need to ship an app.

Every time a user has to wait for a network request to complete before they can get on with their task, we risk losing them. With pausable downloads, we can ensure that even a cancelled download isn't wasted. Here, we look at how to resume a cancelled download to minimise wait times.

People really care about their possessions. They hate when change breaks those possessions 😡. This is as true of digital possessions as physical possessions. Your data model will change, but it doesn't need to break anything. Here, we look at how to migrate a Core Data model step-by-step.

Developers love to talk about tech debt, especially if the developer responsible for introducing it is no longer around. However, often, talk is all that happens because no one can agree on what to tackle first. Here, we look at how to overcome disagreement and get on with paying off that debt 💷.

Ever spent nights reading product reviews, unable to decide which toaster is right for you? Bad news - it's not just the lure of the perfect toaster that can cause this paralysis; CI can as well. But fear not, I've reviewed Travis CI, CircleCI, and Jenkins here to determine which is best for you.

Anyone who has ever worked in a team knows only too well that there is no one true way of formatting code. A team sits down and agrees on what is important to them. These sit-downs can be fraught with danger. Here, we look at how SwiftLint can remove some of that danger.

Coincidental duplication is where we see common functionality between features that just happen to behave or look the same but were never intended to be the same. We then take this coincidental duplication and wrongly build a coupled solution around it. Here, we look at how to avoid that.

An uncomfortable truth is that praising firefighting developers might just be leading to more fires. Here, we look at why needing firefighting developers is a sign that your processes need to be improved, as avoiding fires is better than managing fires.

We are often told that no matter where you end up, you shouldn't forget where you came from. Usually, this saying is applied to people, but it can also apply to code. Here, we look at how to capture the originating thread when kicking off a background task so that we can return to it later.

Modals are often used as one-way gates, e.g., preventing a user returning to the registration screens after registering. However, this misuse of modals leads to bugs when the user inevitably jumps the gate. Here, we look at how to build proper one-way gates by tweaking the navigation stack.

Hollywood loves ghost-typing animation 👻, but it is surprisingly tricky to get right. Here, we look at how to create the perfect ghost-typing animation that will wow your users.

Every great developer I've known has more than a hint of detective about them - looking for clues, figuring out why something is happening and fixing it. But we never interview for these qualities. Here, we look at how treating interviewing as a story can expose how good the candidate really is.

Gaining insights into how our users use our apps is essential to fully serve their needs. However, gaining those insights can be messy. Here, we look at integrating analytics into our apps without it getting in the way.