Tools on miqu.me

Automatic bridging from Swift to Objective-C using Sourcery

Sun, 21 May 2017 22:30:00 +0100

I recently read a great post by Benjamin Encz about bridging Swift to Objective-C by creating bridging types that can be exposed to the older language. I wondered if his idea can be improved and automated using meta-programming with Sourcery by Krzystof Zablocki. The answer is a very impressive ObjC-like uppercase YES.

Reducing the pain of git bisect with Xcode

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 11:49:01 +0000

There’s times when you need to investigate regressions in your project, and you don’t know have any clue as why something is happening. Git bisect is the best tool for this cases, but it can be painful to use in non small projects using CocoaPods and Xcode. I want to share what I’ve been doing to ease the pain.

App extensions, Xcode and Cocoapods, OMG!

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 09:44:54 +0000

Have you encountered this error when upgrading to the latest CocoaPods (1.1.0), or sharing a library between your iOS App and your extension?

'sharedApplication' is unavailable: not available on iOS (App Extension) - Use view controller based solutions where appropriate instead.

If yes, continue reading, as you might have encountered same issue as myself. I’ve recently had to upgrade a project to using Cocoapods 1.1.0. Things stopped compiling, and I had to investigate the root cause of the problem. It has to do with iOS App extensions, unavailable APIs and how fragile our tooling is ;).

Easy localization management with Google spreadsheets

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 16:50:18 +0000

Last thursday I gave a talk at NSLondon meetup called ‘Minimum Viable Tooling’. The topic was examples of approaching tooling and automation for small teams. I showed real examples of what we do at Peak, where I currently work. One of the things people showed interest in after the talk was how we deal with localizations.

In this post I will replicate the simple solution from scratch, so you can follow along and get started with your own projects. And we will be using Swift for the scripting, just because we can!

Controlling time in the app

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 19:38:37 +0100

Today I want to share a small utility we’ve been using for a while at Peak, my current workplace, to control the system time inside the application and save time while testing or debugging.

Xcode 8: New build settings and analyzer improvements

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 21:50:16 +0100

I always like to check the new build settings and analyzer improvements of every Xcode release. And this year’s main release includes a couple of goodies. Let’s check them out!

Dear SDK developer

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 12:50:32 +0100

As an application developer I get to use many third party code to integrate it into my current project. I want to share a checklist of things a user of an SDK really appreciates.

Xcode 7.3 analyzer improvements

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 20:39:53 +0000

The latest xcode beta is available for downloading. There are many improvements, and the usual problems with stuff that stops working… Ah the love of Apple for it’s developers :). But I want to tell you about a feature that caught my attention: New analyzer settings!

New analyzer settings

From the release notes:

The static analyzer warns when nil is returned from a method or function with a nonnull return type or is passed to a parameter marked nonnull.

Building Swift on OSX

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 00:38:35 +0000

Swift is finally open source! This is great because of many reasons, namely the transparency and chances to learn from the people responsible of building the foundational language you work on. I’ve been checking how easy was to build the runtime, REPL and compiler, and it turns out the team made an excellent job to make the process very easy. Let’s see how to do it.

Three months with XVim

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 22:19:24 +0000

‘Know your key shortcuts’ is the mantra of the productive programmer. I’ve chosen to try using the same keybindings everywhere, investing time and learning Vim. And using xvim in Xcode. In this article I’m going to try to explain why I did this, and I’ll share my experience of the process.

Jumping into existing codebases

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 18:55:18 +0000

I’ve recently changed workplace - we’re hiring! - and I’ve jumped into an existing codebase. This is a good time to review what I like to do when I start to work on a project in these circumstances.

Adopting Objective-C generics

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 22:53:14 +0100

This year in WWDC, Apple introduced Objective-C ‘lightweight’ generics for XCode7. This builds upon the improvements to Objective-C to document the code and improve the interoperability with Swift. I wrote previously about nullability annotations and I continue to be delighted by these changes to the language. Here’s what I think.

Fragmentation

Wed, 27 May 2015 15:16:50 +0100

As an iOS developer or Apple-centric developer, WWDC is a time of excitement and news. The yearly event at Apple offers many networking opportunities, but most importantly sets the stage for the next year of development in the company’s platform. As this year event is closing in, I wanted to write my thoughts on a related, and often overlooked topic; fragmentation

Code injection: Continued

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 17:33:30 +0000

I’ve recently done a short talk @Badoo about code injection. Summarized and gave a demo of my previous blog post.

Check it out if you are interested. Feedback on the talk is more than welcome, contact me

iOS Code Injection

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 12:21:36 +0000

Write code, compile, wait, navigate to screen in application. Fix problem, recompile wait. Oh it was not fixed, start again… Does it sound familiar? For compiled languages there seems to be no workaround this bottleneck. Even though this is true, there are situations where we can reduce the waiting time, increasing our productivity and happiness. Enter code injection.