Beginning immediately, JSQMessagesViewController is no longer officially supported or maintained. In fact, you may have noticed that it has been neglected for the past year. The most recent release was published almost exactly one year ago today. This is an incredibly difficult post for me to write and I have not made this decision carelessly. This open source project had a great run. There was (and still is) a great community around it, and I’m sorry for bringing this to an end.

Continue…

Protocols in Swift and Objective-C are a powerful tool to decouple your code. They allow you to specify a contract between classes that consume them, but defer a concrete implementation to conformers. They allow you to segregate interfaces and invert control. One interesting aspect of protocols in Swift and Objective-C is that protocol members can be optional (optional in Swift or @optional in Objective-C). Unfortunately, this comes with a number of disadvantages and diminishes the robustness of your code, so it is often avoided. However, having optional members is sometimes the right conceptual model for your design. How can you design your protocols to provide optional semantics without specifying them as optional or @optional?

Continue…

A few days ago I was (finally!) updating a project to use Swift 2.2 and I ran into a few issues when converting to use the new #selector syntax introduced by proposal SE-0022. If using #selector from within a protocol extension, that protocol must be declared as @objc. The former Selector("method:") syntax did not have this requirement.

Continue…

Swift is still young and ever-changing. With each release, we have seen dozens of tweaks, additions, and deletions. And there is no reason for us to think that this rapid evolution will decline anytime soon. To remind us of exactly that, the latest post on Apple’s Swift Developer Blog introduces a new feature in Swift 1.1 in Xcode 6.1 — failable initializers.

Continue…

When the App Store launched, there was one iPhone with one screen size and one pixel density. Designing your user interfaces was relatively simple and the technical debt of hard-coding them was cheap. Today, developers and designers face many challenges in creating apps that must work on dozens of different devices. Long gone are the days of 480x320. We can no longer depend on physical screen sizes and must always be prepared for the next generation of devices.

Continue…

When I find my code is slow or troubled, friends and colleagues comfort me. Speaking words of wisdom, write in C. It is understood that foregoing the features and abstractions of high-level programming languages in favor of their low-level counterparts can yield faster, more efficient code. If you abandon your favorite runtime, forget about garbage collection, eschew dynamic typing, and leave message passing behind; then you will be left with scalar operations, manual memory management, and raw pointers. However, the closer we get to the hardware, the further we get from readability, safety, and maintainability.

Continue…

As Apples to apples, Part II made its way around the web, it was praised as well as critiqued. The latter largely consisted of questions regarding the real-world applications of these benchmarks. In general, benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt. I want to take a minute to clarify my thoughts on benchmarks and how I think they can be valuable.

Continue…

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Practice makes perfect. These proverbs have encouraged us all in many different contexts. But in software development, they tug at our heartstrings uniquely. Programmers persevere through countless nights of fixing bugs. Companies march vigilantly toward an MVP. But after 1.0 there is no finish line, there is no bottom of the 9th inning. There are more bugs to be fixed. There are new releases ahead. The march continues, because software is not a product, it is a process.

Continue…

When Craig Federighi arrived at his presentation slide about Objective-C during this year’s WWDC keynote everyone in the room seemed puzzled, curious, and maybe even a bit uneasy. What was happening? As he continued, he considered what Objective-C would be like without the C, and the room abruptly filled with rumblings and whispers ^[1] as developers in the audience confided in those around them. If you had been following the discussions in our community about the state of Objective-C (and why we need to replace it) during the previous months, you could only have imagined one thing: Objective-C was no more — at least not as we knew it.

Continue…