Error handling makes everything more complicated. Ugh! What do you do if a network call times out (pretty common)? Or you’re trying to save an image and there is no disk space (less common but can happen)? Or that thing that’s never supposed to happen happens (occasionally happens)?
I mean, you have to do something, right? Ugh. 🤦🏻♂️
Here are some tips. Thanks to Swift By Sundell for giving this topic some attention.
👉 Propagating user-facing errors in Swift
Via iOS Dev Weekly.
A new software architecture! Hurray! 🙌🤷🏻♂️
I’m filing this away as an idea to try on my next app because all other architectures are still just annoying in some way, and this one has a good name. 😆
This architecture is designed to work with SwiftUI and UIKit on any Apple platform (iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS).
👉Composable Architecture, the library
Via iOS Dev Weekly.
App users may not be aware — and app developers often forget — that favorite app of yours might be running native code from a third party such as Facebook. Besides making your app potentially way bigger to download, it can also cause instability. When Facebook screws up, suddenly you can’t run TikTok, Spotify, and countless others apps.
This actually happened recently. 💥
👉 The big Facebook crash of 2020 and the problem of third-party SDK creep
It was as if Facebook had an “app kill switch” that they activated, and it brought down many of people’s favorite iOS apps.
For this and other reasons such as added integration complexity, when I’m making my next app, I am going to try to minimize third-party libraries.
It seems like software architecture often focuses on theoretical concepts and cool ideas, but we should look at things like this that can impact millions of real users. IMHO we developers need to consider third-party libraries as a liability to be weighed against the vulnerabilities they open up. 💥
Also, a shout out to the “App-ocalypse” video from this article. 😆
I’m filing this away as an architecture guide for SwiftUI because it’s recommended by iOS Dev Weekly. 👍
👉 MVP + Coordinators in SwiftUI (part 1)
This is part 1 of a 3-part series and has a supporting GitHub repo.
Are you wondering how to get some information from one component to another in SwiftUI? Too many options to consider? This helpful post walks you through all the scenarios.
👉 View Communication Patterns in SwiftUI
Cheat sheet:
Via iOS Dev Weekly.
Most of us developers know can we can should abstract the network layer to support mocking, unit testing, and just to produce a more flexible design.
While lots of us know this, in practice it seems to get overly complicated and not always done well. A good design should simplify things, not complicate things. This is why I like this post focusing on using protocols to simplify network requests and improve testability. It even gets into decoding responses to give you a useful end-to-end flow.
👉 Removing the network layer in your iOS app
Even better, this is part of a Power of Protocols series (yay!).
Developing features for a large, established app, I often run get slowed down trying to throw together a new screen. You have to find the right spot in the code to update, build the whole app (not just what you changed), log in, and drill down to the right spot to try out your creation. Something’s off? Do it all over again.
Which is why I love the idea of the Playbook library, which is “a library that provides a sandbox for building UI components without having to worry about application-specific dependencies.” Yass! 🤟
Supports both SwiftUI and UIKit.
Via iOS Dev Weekly.
