Tech

In Swift 4 UILayoutPriority has become a struct, with an initializer and a rawValue, instead of being a rawValue of Float itself. This means that simple assignments became slightly harder:

let constraint = someView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: otherView.leadingAnchor)
// Swift < 4
constraint.priority = 999
// Swift 4
constraint.priority = UILayoutPriority(rawValue: 999)

Besides this, I've always had a pet peeve – activating constraints that require priority manipulation:

NSLayoutConstraint.activate([
  someView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: otherView.leadingAnchor),
  someView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: otherView.trailingAnchor)
])

One of my biggest dreams has always been to create a great product of my own, and/or be part of a great team that creates one. Today I took a step towards this dream, and I'm happy to announce that I started a small software company. For now it's mostly me, but I hope in time it'll grow. Such a mixture of feelings ...

Excited. Scared. Eager. Patient. Hard working. Tired. Restless. Hopeful.

Joyful.

By the end of the year we'll have two projects finished, and I can't wait to show them to you. Depending on the project and deadline, we might also be available for collaboration/hire, so don't hesitate to contact us.

Took a while, but it was a bit ... nostalgic 😁.

Please let me know if I missed anything.

The other day I gave IconJar a try. It's an app to store, group, preview, search and export your icons. I won't go into much detail, because the feature list is nicely presented on their website, but I'd like to mention one thing, the export function; it has to be one of the best I've seen so far: select one/several icons, select different sizes (manually, or a built-in preset), any color and a suffix/prefix, if desired.

On their website they also offer a few lists of hand-picked icon sets, free and premium, that might be worth checking out; no need to mention, but all of these are already packed in .iconjar files, for easy importing.

If you have a library of icons of any size and if you work with icons even occasionally, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you to at least give the trial a try.

I guess it's that time of year again, when I change the editor I use to write. The last editor I was using, LightPaper, hasn't seen any updates in the past year and a half, which is a bummer, because I really think it has potential, and it's already a pretty good app; it just didn't fit my needs/desires. I know, I'm spoiled when it comes to editors, but I'm also a sucker for clean, dark themes.

Recently, I stumbled across Caret, which has everything I look for: in-line Markdown highlighting, syntax assistance, live and customizable (through CSS) preview, an easy-to-the-eyes dark theme and a great, language-aware, syntax theme for code blocks.

Truth be told, I haven't installed a free game like this since ... as long as I can remember. I haven't played games like Candy Crush et al, so I don't really know if this is the standard or not, but I'd like to share my latest experience. You don't have to have experience with this genre, it's all generic stuff, or obvious enough.

I like tower defense games, and the other day I thought I'd give SurvivalArena a try. I saw it's a pay to play, but I thought it can't be that bad, I'll just progress slower; after all, it's a tower defense, what paywalls can there be?

Last time I wrote a few tips for writing APIs; this time I'd like to write a few for consuming them.

I'd like to leave a few tips that I think are adamant in writing good APIs. I've come across all of these mistakes, and they are a pain to deal with. Some more than others, but all decrease the enjoyability of working with them.

Say we have some HTML content we want to display in a UITextView:

if let stringData = string.data(using: .utf16),
	let attributedString = try? NSAttributedString(
		data: stringData,
		options: [.documentType: NSAttributedString.DocumentType.html],
		documentAttributes: nil) {
	attributedText = attributedString
}
else {
	attributedText = nil
}

I used to name them by the type of the parameters passed in, for example:

let dictionary = ["name": "Sneakers", "price": "40"]
let product = Product(dictionary: dictionary)
let viewModel = ProductViewModel(product: product)

But lately, I've been using a more Swifty approach, by having an external name of from or with:

let dictionary = ["name": "Sneakers", "price": "40"]
let product = Product(from: dictionary)
let viewModel = ProductViewModel(with: product)

How do I pick between the two? I go with the following approach: