Articles on iOS
Setting Up React Native Build Environments Using NativeModules
React Native is an emerging platform in the mobile space that allows developers to write native apps in Javascript without having to learn Java or Swift. It’s great conceptually, but developers end up having to write NativeModules (for iOS and Android) anyway because it lacks the tools that other frameworks generally provide. In this blog …
Writing Reliable iOS Tests
Tests help me write better apps. Writing tests informs my interface designs, expresses some of my intentions, and guards against regressions. As applications grow so do the number of tests I’m running as a regular part of my development workflow. If I’m not careful those growing test suites can slow down, become inconsistent, and eventually …
Using Objection with UIViewControllers and Storyboards
I have used Objection in several iOS projects as a lightweight Dependency Injection framework. If you’re not familiar with it, take a look. One pain point has been how to inject dependencies for UIViewControllers that are in storyboards. Your controllers are likely instantiated through segues or by calling instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier on a storyboard instance. Wouldn’t it be nice to …
CocoaPods for Device-Only iOS Libraries
Here at Carbon Five, we consider testing the software we write to be crucial to the long term stability and velocity of our projects. We also value developer productivity. The iOS simulator is a very valuable tool for testing and development. Recently a major upgrade of a library prevented an iOS project from running and …
iOS Integration Tests with Kiwi
I have been using Kiwi to run my iOS projects’ tests. Kiwi works great for defining BDD style unit tests which express the sort of nested assertions I like to write. Unit tests should test code in isolation so that they remain small, fast, and stable. So my unit tests mock or stub any network …
Fixture data for iOS tests
I have talked about running xcode units tests from the command line before. When I’m running tests I often want to load some sort of test fixture data for use in my tests. For example: I might want to keep a file of recorded API responses so that I can stub out network calls. In …
Customizing the iOS Keyboard
Our applications need input and the default iOS keyboards are often not optimally suited to providing the sort of data we want. When we find that we really wish the keyboard had some extra controls or want to help our users enter a specific set of symbols it is time to customize our apps’ keyboards.
Monkey-Patching iOS with Objective-C Categories Part I: Simple Extensions and Overrides
Have you ever wanted to introduce new functionality to base classes in the iOS SDK? Or just make them work a little bit differently? In order to do so, you must enter the wild and dangerous world of monkey-patching. Monkey-patching is extending or modifying the behavior of code at runtime without changing its original source …
Designing mobile APIs – basic behaviors
As Rails developers we design APIs on a regular basis: routes for browsers to interact with a web app, JSON apis and routes for client side javascript to build dynamic pages, payloads queued for background processing on a server, and so on. As we move into mobile development we can benefit from many of the …
Managing iOS Configurations per Environment in Xcode 4
Update 4/2014 I recommend using .xcconfig files for managing your configurations. Take a look at this post. At Carbon Five we usually have 3 – 4 environments our iOS applications will run against: development, acceptance, staging and production. Often, the property values that are unique across environments are URLs to APIs that we are integrating …