Refactoring Legacy Code is hard. There are a few safe refactorings you can do with caution. But most chirurgical cuts require you to put the code in a test harness first to guard against regression. With C and Swift, you can create free functions as part of your app. To verify your objects use that function, you need to find a way to insert a test double.
I’m working hard on the Word Counter. By October, I’m going to finish a really big feature: file and folder monitoring. It’s a pretty tough ride till then to get it done.
Since the Word Counter is not on the Mac App Store, please show your support and leave a ★★★★★ rating on MacUpdate.
You don’t have to write a full review in order to leave a rating. Just click the five stars at the very top of the page – but a review is much appreciated, of course!
As always: if you experience any hiccups on Yosemite or El Capitan, please tell me so I can fix the bugs.
I discovered a Swift library called Static the other day. It helps set up and fill UITableViews with static content – that is, it doesn’t permit deletion or rearrangement of new rows into the table. I think the following example to configure sections with rows reads really nice:
It’s a good time to update my book for Swift 2: guard clauses improve readability, and do-try-catch error handling shows problem points. Protocol extensions are huge, but I had no use for them in the sample code, yet. The update is live now. If you haven’t bought the book in the past, grab it until August 1st to save more than 50%: use the coupon Swift2Yay. The coupon is good for 10 copies, so be quick.
Oy vey, now there’s a ton of AltConf 2015 talks online, too! So much to digest! In “250 Days Shipping With Swift and VIPER” by Brice Pollock, he shows how the folks at Coursera do some clever things with the VIPER iOS app architecture: they use a Router which handles internal URLs.
There’s a WWDC 2014 talk called “Advanced iOS Application Architecture and Patterns”. In the first 30 minutes, you can learn a lot about designing information flow in your app. Sticking to Andy Matuschak’s example, a view controller is usually the place to put all behavior. (Hint: this is a bad idea.)
There’s this saying that the Strategy pattern can be realized in Swift using blocks. Without blocks, a Strategy object implements usually one required method of an interface (or protocol) to encapsulate a variation of behavior. This behavior can be switched at runtime. It’s like a plug-in.
I found a cute info-graphic on how to become an iOS developer by John Kim. This study guide contains a passage with a very interesting distinction between programming and engineering. Thanks to it, I found out a detail about what it means to write “clean code.”
Citing from the graphic:
Programming is like building the bridge. You need to know how to use the tools to get your end result. In this way, you need to know the programming language to build your “bridge”
Software engineering is like knowing how to design a bridge. You need to know the proven industry design rules to make a long lasting and reliable “bridge”. In this way you need to learn software engineering to design great software
Learning the Syntax and grammar of a programming language is pretty straight foward [sic!]
Understanding software engineering is the hard part about becoming an iOS developer
Learn BOTH but focus on Software Engieering [sic!]
Software engineering is about the design principles. It’s the necessary condition to plan the components of object-oriented projects like those for iOS and Mac. It is required to write clean code.
Programming itself is about API knowledge, understanding the language grammar and the like.
Of course we write clean code, but we’re able to write it only because we’re able to make a clean design up in the first place. So there’s not much clean coding, but a lot more clean design.
I’m knees-deep in code and wait for new provisioning profiles from Apple to release an app for Mac next week. Fingers crossed! Meanwhile, I wanted to care for my recently updated Calendar Paste 2 more and reach out to bloggers and the press to increase coverage.