AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers

SwiftUI Environments with curves and surfaces

November 09, 2021 Jeroen Leenarts Episode 54
AppForce1: news and info for iOS app developers
SwiftUI Environments with curves and surfaces
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Show Notes Transcript
Jeroen Leenarts:

Hi, and welcome to the 54th episode of my podcast app. First one, my name is Leenarts. And I've been developing software for over 19 years developing iOS apps for nine years, and I'm running the Dutch cocoa hats for over eight years. If you're an iOS app developer, you should listen to my podcast because we'll keep you updated on interesting articles conference and events you might not have heard about. In this episode, I'm going to talk about understanding how and when swift UI decides to redraw views. A brief guide to effective onboarding for mobile engineering teams, custom swift UI environment values, chichi curves and surfaces, Swift Playgrounds, app projects. And of course, daanish, Monday morning tweets, my episode is out a little bit later than usual. It's been very busy over the past couple of days. Last week was my first weekend a new job. So a lot of new impressions. Lots of things that were new, but I also in the first week, I already became productive, which is good. So so many things planned for the future, and hopefully, by some work that I'm doing this week, on my own time, and we're able to announce something interesting next week as well. An interesting conference that will be happening soon is ns, Spain, if you haven't got any tickets yet, have a look at our website, and spain.com. And, and see if you'd like to join the conference, that's in a week from now. So it's on November 18, and 19th. On another note about the keyboard really, I finally got all the components that are needed for my Do It Yourself keyboard built, I put it together correctly, I think on my Twitter, you can actually see a little video of the device working. It's a nice split layout keyboard, called Lily five, eight L. And what's really nice about it is that with the help of my dad, I was able to debug some false the LEDs that were not working. And now it just seems to work all correctly. All 35 LEDs on each side, because it's a split layout keyboard, got some nice key caps on it, I'm still waiting for the correct switches because right now I have cherry browns in them. So let's tactile switches. And I'm waiting for Kill Box Navy clicky switches. And these are the ones that are obnoxiously loud. So probably in one of my next episodes, you're gonna hear those clicking in the background, I'm afraid. So sorry about that already, my wife, she got hit in the hat. During her gymnastics class, she was catching a girl that got into trouble doing a flip due to her intervention, the girl is fine, a little bit of a sore arm, but the elbow of the girl hit my wife in the face. And she's now taking some time off with a concussion. So it's not not a lot of fun for her. But it does provide me with a little bit of a smile every now and then because usually she's the one that never forgets anything. And now she's the one that that has like a little bit of trouble in her short term memory. But I already noticed in the last few days that it's been improving significantly. Let's get started with this week's articles. Understanding how and when swift UI decides to redraw views. This is an article by Donnie walls. And there's a good chance that you're using Swift UI and that you're not quite sure how and when swift UI determines which views should redraw. And arguably, that's a good thing. Swift UI is clearly smart enough to make decent decisions about any negative consequences. In fact, you might even have to set up your app in a way that coincidentally plays into Swift UI strings beautifully. There's an equal likelihood that your setup isn't as performant as you might think. But you're just not seeing any issues yet. Recently, Donnie had to figure out how swift UI determines that it should redraw fuse in order to fix some performance issues. And one issue was that for some reasons, Swift UI decided that it needed access to the bodies of a lot of us that never change to which led to some drop frames while scrolling. And another issue that don't investigate is one where scrolling performance suffered greatly, when just one or two items in the list were updates. Well, Donnie mentioned that the details and specifics of these issues aren't as interesting. What's more interesting, in his opinion, is what he learned about how and when swift UI determines to redraw fuse, because some of the things he has noticed were quite surprising to him, while others felt very natural and confirmed some thoughts that Donnie has regarding swift UI. So if you want to dig into the internals of what makes swift UI redraw certain aspects of user interface, have a look at Danny's article. It's one of his thorough reads again, so a lot of code a lot of explanation, just good article overall, to get some more grip on the lifecycle of Swift UI. The next article I wanted to mention is by bit Ries, it's a brief guide to effective onboarding for mobile engineering teams. A proper onboarding strategy featuring a standard set of processes and tools increase employee retention rates, improve job performance, and creates a happier workforce. In this short guide bit right we'll have a look at how poor onboarding experiences can adversely affect mobile development teams, as well as some engineering specific tips to design great onboarding processes for your prospective mobile developers. Well, of course, this is an article written from the perspective of an Have an employer. But you as an employee can also have a big factor in onboarding new team members and actually onboarding yourself. So read this article, see if there's anything useful for you. And make sure that when the new hire arrives, or when you're starting somewhere new, that you take these tips to heart and that you didn't either suggest or implement these things right away. Because proper onboarding, it's something that really helps really makes you feel at home at your new place. And I've experienced this myself in the last week, to a great extent. And I'm only like, into the first week of my onboarding process. And my onboarding process is actually a program of three months. So yeah, the, you could go very far with onboarding. And, yeah, in my experience, it's always good to have something ready for when people start their new job at your place. So the next article is by Federico Santa tele. It's custom swift UI environment values cheat sheet, Federico calls it a cheat sheet, but it's an article that's an overview of data types and things related to storing information industry, if you aren't environment, it's the closing article of a series of articles he did on Swift UI environment. All these articles are linked from the top of this article. And I'd say have a look at all articles on the series. Because this is a really nice article series on the environment that's related to Swift UI, have a look at it, review it, learn from it, and make sure that you get the environment in which you are used. Correct. The next article is by Bartos Chang offski. It's called curse and services. And I'll just read a little bit from the article. It's a very long article, actually, from fonts to animated movies, curves and surfaces constitute fundamental building blocks of many geometrical designs. Over the course of this blog post, Bartos will explain how this model of a mask can be very smooth, despite being described by a limited number of small points that you can drag around to change the mask shape. Moreover, we'll see how surfaces like that are natural extension of plain two dimensional curves, like in written letters, and throughout this article, he'll keep on jumping back and forth between curves and surfaces to highlight how the ideas we develop for wiggly lines can be expanded into three dimensional shells that we can shape. It's a it's a nice article that goes into some of the details involved with vishay curves and other ways of defining curves in ENCODE. And yeah, it's it's what's really fun about this article is that there's a lot of samples in there that you can just play with. So even the mask that is mentioned at the start of the article, it's it's an interactive little graph. And you can just change the eye shape, make them make the nose a little bit longer, and change the shape of the mouth, and just all kinds of things you can do there. Also, in this very long article, you learn a lot about brushy curves and how these are applied in code. There is a little bit of math involved as well. But I must say that if you have some basic understanding of algebra, this is quite easy to follow along. And it's just, it's just so much fun to just see this stuff in action again, because it was during my education that it was basically the last time that I played with these things. So maybe this is an article that's a bit of an of a throwback article for me. But I really liked the fact that such a fundamental structure, it's so much easier to understand if you can just play with things that it's not a lot of Swift code in here, not actually. But the things that you learned in this article apply for us, for instance, in the UI, Bish, a curve or path in in UI kit. And I think there's also equivalent classes and objects available in Swift UI. So have a look at this article. If it's something for you, please enjoy it, read it to its fullest. I spent like half an hour just dragging around all kinds of aspects of the of the samples on the on the page. So see what you think about this article. The next article is by Aaron sky. It's called Swift Playgrounds app projects. Beware This article is about the current Xcode 13.2 beta one, which is of course subject to change over the course of the beta cycle. During the status platform presentation. at WWDC 2021, Apple announced that the upcoming version photo of the Swift Playgrounds app for iPad would introduce support for full fledged app development, including the ability uploads to App Store Connect. This announcement was relatively minor amongst everything else revealed back in June but it did raise a question in the back of Aaron's minds. What What does new playground projects look like? Just last week, Xcode 13. The tool released its first better while we wait for the full release of the Swift Playgrounds for he was surprised that not only would that question be answered by Xcode, but the new Swift Playgrounds app project format would also share a compatibility story with Xcode. This has him more excited than ever about the future of the Xcode project for months. So it's a article that's a deep dive into this new way Swift Playgrounds app projects feature and it's just something that's that's of interest to me. You actually mentioned something about too as well, in the fact that to stand Xcode, Jen, are a way to take away the Xcode project from your from your version control. So it's exciting times, I think, because this might actually be the start of a new format for Xcode projects. And yeah, who knows what will come of this. I do like the fact that you as it looks right now, you can do somewhat some sort of development on an iPad. There are some limitations in place still, but it is the start of something new. And I think it'll be interesting to watch what Apple will do with this new app development on the iPad. One feature many people dreamed about in last year's WWDC has been in fact, an Xcode version or something similar that would work on an iPad, Apple somewhat delivered. But right now, it's the time that we're going to see what this delivery will actually start to look like. So very curious about whether or not the Swift Playgrounds app projects is going to be in the final Xcode 13 Or two, and how it would actually then look. So that's the articles of this week. As I already mentioned, at the start of my podcast, have a look at enter spain.com. That's a nice conference that's usually pre pandemic and was in Spain, but right now it's remote. So you can quite easily join, they have an interesting novel format, that it's a two day conference with a low time investment. So you get a ticket. And then during the entire conference cycle, you can just step in and step out again, pick out the content that you like, and just interact at points in time that you that you find convenient for your schedule. Then what remains is Donnie waltzes Monday morning tweets. So let's have a look at that one, called Ex Machina mentions that he or she spent a weekend writing his or her first article on coding ever talking about displaying fractions in Swift UI. So that's like a nice graphical article. I'll actually link to that one from the show notes. If you want to have a look better Freeza, the developer advocates at Firebase at Google started blogging about how to replicate apps Reminders app using Swift UI, and Firebase. So he's doing the advocacy thing. And he's digging in Leo G. Dion mentions that Peter will be on a podcast episode two tomorrow. So most likely, Peter has been a guest at Leo's enum is mentioning that he had a busy lawn launch week, and his app is finally live. So that's the unsafe safe cracking game on your wrist. It's a it's a interesting little app that this sort of like uses haptic feedback on your Apple Watch. I tried it in the better cycle. And it's, it's a novel interesting thing. But I didn't really get into the game. But I think if this is something that you enjoy, then most likely enema has something for you that you're really going to love. So have a look at an colon safe on the app store and see what you think. tannin is planning a new iOS app for organizing Twitter apps, still answering Twitter, why I won't reveal their API data to government entities. So he's going through all the onboarding and hoops that Twitter needs you to go through before they give you access to their API's. Do GD on mentions, indeed, that he's releasing an episode with Peter Fraser about Firebase. And he's doing a chat with I was laying on Objective C and he's working on get century and Google Analytics integration. And he's continuing to brag digit redesign. And so he's and he's playing some Luigis mentioned three with the family. So and he's waiting on a baby. So he's got lots of things to do. So he's always basically it seems limited. DFS has some nice light mode, additions to the bluebird app, and he made some animations for fun. So it's, it's a really cool animation with the sun and the moon switching between each other when you switch between light and dark mode, or like, released a new app light LC light Liches client for playing chess online and semen bogucki is finished with dub dub crab by Shawn Allen. And he's now applied his new knowledge to a side project good habits, and he started beta testing version 0.1 through testflight, so if anyone is interested, please DM Semen bogucki. And you'll get an invite for his test flight and Phillip Nemecek has been doing some web design. He's done some work on the in the app catalog so have a look at that one as well because it's a nice visual upgrade that he did. Christoph has created a 90 plus remote companies hiring mobile developers from Europe article on Gumroad. I think it's a it's a paid thing. But considering the information and the price point that he put out, it's it's a good deal. Actually. Roll pap is working on the QR codes and the corona check app in the Netherlands. So he's doing some important work here for the Dutch government and the Dutch population really. And a COA is mentioned in good morning to Donnie and he helped me had a nice weekend and he's managed to support Siri shortcut for all get Almighty tweaks and monitoring and flow rates. Code mentions that he has updated the app challenge me with a brand new design. And the challenge me app is about self improvement so he can challenge so you can put challenges for yourself into this app. And then this app actually keeps you accountable humor getting made a front side project for swift UI jam. It's not useful for music production. It is fun, though. And he's wanting to polish it a little bit before he can release it. And the list goes on and on with people learning new things. And it seems like people are really having a lot of fun. And what's really nice as well, is that equal piccata is working on the hybrid swift UI app prototyping using turbo iOS. But it shares are very helpful articles by Joe mastelotto. And Joe Masato immediately jumps in to suggest that Igor at DMC, if he has any questions, or needs any help, so that's what I like to see people having fun, creating new stuff helping each other. And yeah, that's about it for this week. If you want to support my podcast, have a look at pot dot fan slash app Force One. You can have early access to interviews I have recorded previously. I tend to upload dose with minimal editing so that you can have a quick listen to upcoming episodes on my podcast. And otherwise, just keep on listening. And I will talk to you again next week. And have a great week everybody