Top-notch video tutorials for Swift developers

Pluralization rules vary by language, so it's not as easy as just adding an "s". To properly handle these cases, we need to use a Stringsdict file and format our string using a special syntax.

In this episode we introduce a new open source library called Swift Coding that takes all of these concepts and wraps it up into a Swift Package you can use in your own projects. We give a tour of what the library can do and how you can use it.

Sometimes we need menus to be dynamic, or we need to fetch some data before being able to build out the menu items. In this episode we will see how to leverage UIDeferredMenuElement to fetch some data and build a dynamic menu.

Last time we talked about the Encodable protocol. This time let's look at the Decodable protocol. We explore the general concept, then introduce zip and map as utilities to compose smaller decodings into larger ones.

We start exploring the concept of converting Encodable into an Encoding protocol witness. We discover how to clean up our code and make it fit in with `JSONEncoder`’s existing API. We then break down our example into smaller pieces and discuss how we can leverage pullback and functional composition to build bigger pieces out of smaller ones.

In the next few episodes we will explore the concept of Protocol Witnesses. This is an advanced topic that can be somewhat hard to approach, but in learning about Protocol Witnesses you will see how we can leverage the Swift language and functional programming to do some really cool things.

Let's see how we can provide a custom view controller to preview when a context menu is opened. This is analogous to (and a replacement for) the Peek/Pop interaction for devices that supported 3D Touch.

Another common use of context menus is with table views and collection views. In this episode we will explore adding a menu to a table view cell that allows copying a font or toggling it from a favorites list.

In this episode we will see how to nest menus inside each other as well as dynamically choosing when to show a nested menus contents inline.

Context menus are a great affordance for performing related actions to a UI element. Users can tap and hold to view the context menu, and the gesture is consistent across the OS so users will likely already be familiar with it. In this episode we'll show how to set up a basic context menu with a custom preview with normal and destructive actions.

Ever wanted to translate from one type to another, for instance mapping from network models to core data objects? In this episode we will explore how to leverage Swift Keypaths to create a mapping between models. Along the way we'll run into a limitation of key paths and then talk about how to work around it.

Now that we have some streaming output from the ffmpeg process, we can take this and create a custom progress bar. Since this could useful in other utilities we can create it as a separate Swift package and import it using a local file reference.

I always like it when command line programs offer colored output, which helps to discern between various stages of output, highlight errors and other important information. This is done with ANSI color codes, which are a somewhat archaic technique, but we can implement a nice wrapper to make it easy to work with in Swift.

Working with files and folders with FileManager is cumbersome. Instead we'll lean on the excellent Files package from John Sundell.

I use a collection of command line scripts that help me in the production of NSScreencast episodes. Most are written in Ruby, which is a language I know and love, and some are written in bash, which is... a language. I sometimes wonder what these scripts would look like if I were to write them in Swift. So in this new series I'm going to explore rewriting a script that I use to encode videos using Swift. In this episode we'll bring in the excellent Swift Argument Parser library and use it to give us a clean and consistent command line interface to start with.

Foundation has a wonderfully useful support for dealing with measurements like distances, durations, temperatures and more in Swift. The Measurement class combines with a Unit type to constrain the measurements into their own domains. With this you can get functionality like conversion and addition. With MeasurementFormatter we can format these values for display in our UI based on the user's locale. In this episode we will explore how to use this API, how to extend the existing dimensions to add new measurement values, and how to create your own domain of measurements. For this we will model Throughput of Items in the game Factorio.

Managing dependencies can be a pain. Unless you're using shared instances accessible everywhere, you end up having to pass along dependencies from class to class. One strategy for decoupling your types from external dependencies is to create protocols and "inject" the actual concrete implementations at runtime. This enables you to test them easily and also isolates library-specific APIs from the rest of your application. This can make switching between libraries more feasible. In this episode we'll take a look at a library called Resolver that does this. Technically it implements Service Location rather than Dependency Injection, but the result is similar.

I've been working on rendering waveforms using mathematical functions and have found the experience to be both fun and enlightening. In this episode we will develop a method to render arbitrary functions using a Shape, then explore some mathematical concepts that can help us render a nice looking waveform that could be use to indicate activity in sound, speech, or other effects.

In UIKit we've often lamented the fact that there is no builtin facility to load an image with a URL, leaving developers to implement this on their own. In SwiftUI the situation is the same, however we have more flexibility to build what we need. Using a Swift package called FetchImage, we will create a reusable ImageView struct that can load our images efficiently given a URL.

In this episode we add the ability to provide modal content from outside of the modal view. To do this we can leverage @ViewBuilder which is a type of Function Builder. This is a new Swift feature that gives SwiftUI's syntax a DSL rather than writing out vanilla Swift syntax.

Sometimes legacy APIs that we have to deal with only support XML, and while Swift has first class support for JSON with Codable, XML parsing is still done with Foundation's XMLParser. This is a powerful yet difficult to use class that is modeled as a streaming XML parser. This means you have to write some code that keeps track of the values and state of where we are in the XML document in order to parse it. In this episode we will cover how to parse an XML document using multiple objects, parsers, and a delegate stack.

When working with Codable models, everything is great until you deviate even slightly from the normal behavior. Doing so requires you to drop down to a more manual approach where you have to define your own CodingKeys enum and encode/decode methods. In this episode we will look at a 3rd party set of property wrappers that give you some handy Codable functionality for free.

Swift 5.1 introduced a powerful new feature to the language: Property Wrappers. In this video we will take a look at how to write property wrappers and how to use them to simplify code in our apps.

In the last episode we had a bit of an issue... I was trying to store an enum value in UserDefaults, thinking it would automatically use the backing rawValue to store and load the value. Unfortunately this doesn't work. In this episode we fix this issue and extend our solution to also accommodate other data types by leveraging Codable and a custom protocol.