iOS

I am definitely not a fan of CocoaPods, I use Carthage in all of my projects. It is not ideal but I have a way of using it that works for me.

Recently I was faced with a problem that made me use CocoaPods but in a quite different way, just to build some frameworks to be used elsewhere without CocoaPods.

The problem

I use GRDB.swift to work with the database in iOS applications, especially because it support using SQLCipher to have the database encrypted. The current version 3.x has some problem when used by Xcode 10.2 and Swift 5 so using the latest 4.0 is recommend.

GRDB.swift never supported Carthage but there was always a way to make it work. I usually just needed to delete some of the shared schemes and run carthage build instead of carthage bootstrap. I was not able to make Carthage work with 4.0, mainly because the targets changed. There is no GRDBCipher target for use with SQLCipher anymore, just a podspec definition

  s.subspec 'SQLCipher' do |ss|
    ss.source_files = 'GRDB/**/*.swift', 'Support/*.h'
    ss.framework = 'Foundation'
    ss.dependency 'SQLCipher', '>= 3.4.0'
    ss.xcconfig = {
      'OTHER_SWIFT_FLAGS' => '$(inherited) -D SQLITE_HAS_CODEC -D GRDBCIPHER -D SQLITE_ENABLE_FTS5',
      'OTHER_CFLAGS' => '$(inherited) -DSQLITE_HAS_CODEC -DGRDBCIPHER -DSQLITE_ENABLE_FTS5',
      'GCC_PREPROCESSOR_DEFINITIONS' => '$(inherited) SQLITE_HAS_CODEC=1 GRDBCIPHER=1 SQLITE_ENABLE_FTS5=1'
    }
end

It looks like only using CocoaPods and SwiftPM is now supported, there is not even an easy way to do manual installation.

I had to decide how to integrate 4.0 to my project in the best way possible.

Almost every iOS application uses UITableView to display some kind of data and in many cases the data can be missing. In such situation you typically want to display some kind of “no data” placeholder. The placeholder fills in the empty space and can tell the user what needs to be done to get the data.

There are many ways wo implement such “no data” placeholder, including using libraries like UIEmptyState. If you just need to display a simple text message, there is an really easy way to implement it yourself, as I did in a recent project.

Showing and hiding the placeholder

The easiest way to create a “no data” placeholder for UITableView is to set it as the background view. It will be shown when there is no data in the UITableView so it will not be hidden under any other wiew.

I created a simple UITableView extension to show the placeholder with a specific message

extension UITableView {
    func setNoDataPlaceholder(_ message: String) {
        let label = UILabel(frame: CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: self.bounds.size.width, height: self.bounds.size.height))
        label.text = message
        // styling
        label.sizeToFit()

        self.isScrollEnabled = false
        self.backgroundView = label
        self.separatorStyle = .none
    }
}

To hide it when no longer needed I created another extension method

extension UITableView {
    func removeNoDataPlaceholder() {
        self.isScrollEnabled = true
        self.backgroundView = nil
        self.separatorStyle = .singleLine
    }
}

With this I would have to call those two extension method manually depending on the data in the UITableView which is unnecessary manual work.

When working on an iOS app you may sometimes need to inspect or debug the network traffic between the app and the server to see what exactly is going on. Or you may be just curious to see what data other apps send about you to their servers. The way to achieve this is to run a proxy on your computer and route all the traffic from your iOS device through that proxy.

mitmproxy

Mitmproxy is a free and open source interactive HTTPS proxy. The UX is not as great as in paid app like Charles, but it is still good enough.

Installing and running

You install mitmproxy from homebrew

brew install mitmproxy

and run the command line interface with a simple mitmproxy proxy command. The command line interface takes some time to get used to. If you want something simpler, run the mitmweb command to get a web interface.

Setting up the iOS device

Proxy

When you have mitmproxy or mitmweb running you now need to set your iOS device to use that proxy. On your iOS device, go to Settings | Wi-Fi and to the properties of your Wi-Fi network. Switch the HTTP Proxy to manual and set the it to the IP address of your computer running mitmproxy and port 8080.

A few weeks ago I encountered a strange problem when working on an iOS application that seemed really strange at first sight.

The task

The task was simple. In the chat detail screen I had to add a voice recording button next to the message input. When the user started holding the button (.touchDown) the voice recording should have started, releasing the button (.touchUpInside) should have finish the recording and sliding to side (.touchDragOutside) should have canceled the voice recording.

The message input was located in the bottom right corner of the screen when keyboard was not shown

and moved up with the keyboard

The problem

When the keyboard was visible the quick recording button worked as expected, but when the quick recording button was at the bottom of the screen there was a “lag”, a delay of about 1 second, between touching the button and the .touchDown even firing.

If you use the Twitter app on iOS you might have noticed that tapping the buttons in the tab bar makes them bounces.

This is a very subtle animation that I really like so I decided to do the same for the tab bar in the app I currently work on.

The first step is to find the right place to insert the bounce animation into. When you tap a button in the tab bar, the tabBar(_ tabBar: UITabBar, didSelect item: UITabBarItem) method of the UITabBarController gets called. You cannot override this method in extension, so you have to create a new subclass.

This method gives you the selected UITabBarItem but you need to get to the actual view and its image. I found out that the tab bar contains (at least in my case) a background subview and then subviews corresponding to the tab bar buttons, so when a tab bar button at index N is tapped, its subview is at N+1.

class AnimatedTabBarController: UITabBarController {

    override func tabBar(_ tabBar: UITabBar, didSelect item: UITabBarItem) {
        // find index if the selected tab bar item, then find the corresponding view and get its image, the view position is offset by 1 because the first item is the background (at least in this case)
        guard let idx = tabBar.items?.index(of: item), tabBar.subviews.count > idx + 1, let imageView = tabBar.subviews[idx + 1].subviews.compactMap ({ $0 as? UIImageView }).first else {
            return
        }

        // animate the imageView
    }
}

To create a bounce animation we can use CAKeyframeAnimation and animate the transform.scale key path. Basically, you need to make the image bigger, then slightly smaller and original size again. This is the animation I use