Coding Journal

One of the new features of iOS 11 is the ability to display large headers in the navigation bar by setting the prefersLargeTitles property to true. You can set it for the whole app (using the UIAppearance for example) or differently for each view controller.

But there is a problem. If you navigate from a view controller with large titles enabled to a view controller with large titles disabled, you will see a black artifact under the change animation:

The black artifact comes from the navigation controller. If you set the backgroundColor of the navigation controller’s view to any, like red, it will replace the black artifact with an artifact of that color. The solution is to set the color of the color of you UI, white in my case:

When my ISP had a problem resulting in Internet outage for multiple hours and I needed to work, I wanted to tether the LTE connection from my iPhone 6S to my hackintosh running macOS Sierra. It has no Wi-Fi card so the only was was tethering over USB cable.

The whole process should be easy, just connecting the iPhone to the computer with an USB cable and turning on the Personal hotspot in the Settings. The iPhone immediately registered 1 connection, but Internet did not work on the computer, although everything looked fine in System Preferences

Working on an iOS app I had to implement a filter for the table view displayed on screen. The filter should have contained 5 items and be accessible when tapping the screen title in the navigation bar. My first idea was to use an UIAlertController with those 5 options. It worked but it looked really ugly, So I started searching for a better, nicer solution. Ideally some kind of a dropdown menu.

I found multiple libraries for an iOS dropdown menu, but I liked BTNavigationDropdownMenu the best. The usage is really simple. First you define the items for the dropdown as an string array

create the menu instance

The UI of the iOS app I currently work on contains a tab bar with “Profile” as the title of one of the included tabs. This “Profile” tab contains a view controller with a navigation bar where I wanted the title to be set as “You profile”.

So I set the tab bar item’s title to “Profile” and wanted to set the navigation bar title of the view controller the standard way

I noticed that this also changes the title in the tab bar. After some research I found out that changing the view controller’s title property changes bot the title in the navigation bar and in the bar bar. But you can change the title just for the navigation bar

When I started using Swift the first thing I started missing was the support for abstract classes. I was used to using abstract classes for my ViewModels, especially to implement the template pattern, but also to provide some basic methods, like showing dialogs, that the ViewModels may need. Of course there are some “tricks” to do abstract classes like checking in the class type in constructor and throwing an error if it is the abstract class type, but Swift is a language based on protocols so there are better ways to achieve the same results just using the protocols.

Imagine you want to add a functionality to show iOS alerts to some of your ViewControllers. In a language like C# you would create an abstract class, something like BaseViewController, add a ShowAlert method to it and make all your ViewControllers inherit from this base class. Most languages nowadays only support single inheritance, so you would put all the functionality your ViewController may or may not need to your one abstract class. But you can typically implement as many interfaces as you like.

Using Swift and protocols there is another way. Protocols in Swift are really similar to interfaces in languages like Java or C# but with some neat stuff added to them like default protocol implementation.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words so whenever I create an issue, a pull request or write a blog post about and application or some visual stuff I include a relevant image. Sometimes an image is not enough and an animation is needed to better describe the issue, or show the content of your pull request.

There are some good tools to help you to create animations like this on both Windows and macOS.

When you create a UITableViewCell that you want to use with multiple UITableViews and design its view using a XIB file you know that registering and using it involves the usage of string constants. When you register your custom UITableViewCell with the UITableView you use a string as XIB name and a string as the reuse identifier. Then you use the string reuse identifier again to actually use it. There must be a better, safer way, right? Of course there is, just use Reusable.

Reusable is a Swift mixin for reusing views easily and in a type-safe way for UITableViewCells, UICollectionViewCells, custom UIViews, ViewControllers, Storyboards. It contains protocols you add to your classes and let the magic (the default implementation for those protocols) happen.

So how do you get rid of all those strings when using custom cells with UITableView? First, add the NibReusable protocol to you custom cell class

Working on na iOS app I had to solve a interesting UI problem. The screen had to contain a UITableView with a header. The header should not have been visible when the screen was displayed. In fact the header should not have been visible when the user just scrolled the UITableView up and down, it only had to become visible when the user “dragged” the UITableView down, similar to doing pull to refresh. Scrolling the UITableView then hides the header again.

To better imagine the requirements, take a look at this animation

Notice that you see that the header is there but I have to really drag the UITableView to make it visible. It then disappears when I scroll the UITableView.

My blog is a static website generated using Hugo and running on Netlify (you can read about my move from WordPress to Hugo in a previous article) but I still want to allow users to leave comments on my posts so I use Disqus like many other blogs.

The advantage of Disqus is that you do not need to host the comments yourself, and I really cannot with a static website, you just embed a JavaScript file and everything is taken care of for you. There are a few alternatives to Disqus but none of them works very well so there is basically no other option if you want to have comments on a static website.

The problem with Disqus is that this one JavaScript file you embed to your website makes about 50 requests when a page loads. And that is a lot!

There are some times when you need to re-sign the IPA of your iOS app with a different certificate. For example, an external developer creates the IPA for you, but it is signed with their personal certificate and you need to re-sign it with yours to deploy it to the App Store. Or one of your clients does not want to have their employees install the iOS app from the App Store but wants to distribute it directly using their MDM tools.

The second case is a bit more complicated, because it involves creating a new app identity for the app. When you change the app id if your app, your push notifications will stop working and you need to also generate a new APNS certificate with the new app id and deploy it to your server. Here is everything you need to do, step by step.