Top-notch video tutorials for Swift developers

You may encounter a scenario where you want to decode some JSON that contains an array of objects that may be of a different type. In this episode we examine such a scenario, where we have a feed that contains an array of posts, but each post object can be of a different kind, such as text, image, or video. We will take a look at how to solve this by introducing a protocol called DecodableClassFamily, and along with a Discriminator that will inform the decoding logic which type it should decode. We'll then take this working example and make a reusable solution using Swift Generics.

In this episode we customize our call-to-action Subscribe button. Using @IBDesignable and Interface Builder we can preview how it looks in the various button states without having to recompile and run in the simulator every time.

In this episode we create some more custom @IBDesignable views, this time for a padded genre label where we use the intrinsicContentSize to make a label take up more space and give itself a little padding. We also create a separator view that draws a thin line to separate sections visually.

In this episode we create a custom UIView subclass that draws a gradient overlay. This allows us to overlap the podcast information above the artwork slightly.

In this episode we start laying out the Podcast Detail screen. We'll start by using an embedded view controller for the header portion, which contains all of the top-level information about the podcast. We'll then see how we can utilize this child view controller to contain all of our outlets and how to pass data from the parent view controller to the child.

To get the information we need for the Podcast Detail screen, we’ll have to get the feed URL and parse it. There’s no built-in Codable support for XML, so we’ll look at using FeedKit to parse the feeds and extract the relevant information we need.

In this episode we build another API client to search for podcasts matching a term and customize the UI and behavior of the search bar. We display the recommended podcasts first, then when a user types in a term we show the matching podcasts from the iTunes API.

In this episode we take the response from the top podcasts feed and decode the JSON into models using Codable.

It's time to start talking to external APIs to get the data we want to display in the app. We start by exploring the API we want to consume with Paw, a useful macOS app. We then create a simple API client class that abstracts most of the boilerplate logic around how to handle the various URLSession outcomes.

Working with images from the network is such a common task in iOS development. In this episode we'll cover a useful library called Kingfisher, which gives you a simple API for downloading and caching images from the network. We also look at two ways for configuring our image view, one using User-Defined Runtime Attributes and the other by using awakeFromNib in code.

In this episode we add our tableview cell styling to match the design, using autolayout to arrange the views and using the Xcode View Debugger to find and fix a visual glitch when using dark background cells.

In this episode we start building our first table view cells. We then build a protocol to represent Reusable Views, such as UITableViewCells. With this protocol you can supply a simple type reference and the reuse identifier and casting happens for you. Leveraging Swift's protocol extensions allows you to leverage your conventions to write cleaner, safer code.

We start from a blank project template, then add our first storyboard and tab bar controller. We also introduce a mechanism for skinning the app with a Theme type.

Taking input from a request body in order to update or create a record is extremely easy with Vapor. In this episode we will update our create and update routes for Projects and take in JSON input from the request in order to modify Projects. We also talk about decoupling the request model from our actual model to prevent updating certain internal attributes from being modified.

So far in this series we have been adding all of our routes to the routes.swift file. You can see that this would get unwieldy over time. In this episode we will use RouteCollections to build controllers so that we can organize the routes around the Projects resource. We’ll conform our Project type to the Parameter protocol to make loading models from a route parameter extremely simple, and we will leverage the Content protocol to have the results serialized to JSON automatically.

When you have a many-to-many relationship you typically rely on a join table, or what Vapor calls a Pivot table to relate the records together. In this episode we will create a relationship to allow an issue to have many tags, and also allow a tag to apply to many issues. We'll see how we can use Vapor's ModifiablePivot and Sibling types to make working with these relationships easier.

We continue our mini-project to create a Swift script that automatically creates migrations for Vapor projects. In this episode we save the generated templates to disk, render a generated extension so that we can add these migration types to the Vapor service, and see the example running end-to-end.

Our Project and Issue models currently aren't connected in any way. In this episode we will add a foreign key to the projects table and add the parent/child relationships the models so that we can query for issues belonging to a project.

Usually I lean on Ruby or Bash for writing command line scripts, but it is becoming increasingly more viable to use Swift for this as well. In the Vapor series, I wanted to write a little script (in Swift) that would generate migration files for me so I wouldn’t have to maintain this myself. For this, I used the Marathon tool, which helps alleviate some of the machinery necessary to use Swift in this way. And what better way to explore this tool than with this author guiding me along. John Sundell joins me in this episode to use Marathon and Swift to write a useful script for Vapor applications. This is a longer episode, so it is split into two parts. Enjoy!

Working with dates is a task that is universally applicable to Swift developers. Particularly when dealing with an API, dates can arrive in all shapes and sizes. We‘ll examine some of the common ones such as ISO 8601, show how to parse these formats into Date instances, and how to use DateFormatter to display them back again as a string. We‘ll also cover the importance of using en_US_POSIX and honoring the user‘s Locale when displaying dates.

In the last 2 episodes we added some behavior to add automatically managed timestamp fields and some fairly complex logic to set up UUID primary keys the way we want. Now if we want to share those, or make them the default for our models, we currently have to copy & paste. In this episode we will refactor this logic into reusable protocols so that our work can be applied on any model we wish easily.

If you want to track when records are created and modified, you can add some fields to your model and Fluent will automatically manage them for you. You just have to take care to define your TimestampKey properties carefully so they match what Fluent expects.

In this episode we take a deeper look at one of the fundamental building blocks that support Vapor's asynchronous programming model: Futures. Understanding Futures is really important to understand when writing Vapor applications.

Now that we have Fluent set up, let’s see how we can use it to add, update, and delete records to the database. We’ll get a taste for how futures work in Vapor, and we will also see some of the builtin features that Vapor has to make loading records from your routes really simple.