Correctly laying out an iPhone application sometimes feels like the 20% of a project that takes 80% of your effort/time. That’s why when Apple hit us with NSLayoutAnchor in iOS 9 I jumped on the opportunity to make life easier. If you haven’t spent time using NSLayoutAnchor check out Getting Started with NSLayoutAnchor (Swift 4.0) my article real quick and … Read More
Adding a Parallax Effect to a UIScrollView using NSLayoutAnchor
One of the most common animations we see nowadays is the parallax effect. You see it on a lot of websites and sprinkled here and there inside of mobile applications. It’s hard to put into words why it’s so enjoyable but like flies, we’re drawn to it. That’s why today I’ll show you how to implement it programmatically inside of … Read More
Create a Paging Scroll View using NSLayoutAnchor and UIStackView
Today I wanna show you how to implement a Paging Scroll View programmatically using some cool AutoLayout APIs. You might be asking “Why do this programmatically?”. Truth is, you could do a mix of storyboard or completely in storyboard and get the same result.The reason is that in my next tutorial Adding a Parallax Effect to a UIScrollView using NSLayoutAnchor I … Read More
How to Guard your Secrets Using Git
Depending on how long you’ve been programming this might seem obvious, or odd. Recently, I’ve been playing with a few APIs and chose GitHub for version control. The problem is on GitHub (because I don’t pay) the code I push is public so how do I keep those API keys secret? The Swift community has a few answers to this … Read More
Optimizing Google Translation API calls for iOS
Recently, I started working on an app that needed the ability to translate text to different languages. That meant looking and finding the right API. I settled on using the Google Cloud Platform Translation API because of its great documentation and assumed reliability. The catch is that it’s not a free service. Google will charge $20 per 1,000,000 characters it … Read More
How to Integrate React into Rails using Webpacker
If you’re a Rails developer then you’ve heard the Rail’s mantra “Convention over Configuration” many times. Some can argue it’s a weakness but we’ve embraced it wholeheartedly. The problem is that sometimes it makes the Rail’s framework feel too rigid to adapt new trends. Specifically, interactive UIs built using JavaScript frameworks. The popularity of JS frameworks like Angular and React have … Read More
Getting Started with NSLayoutAnchor (Swift 4.0)
Displaying views correctly on the screen can be one of the most frustrating parts of building apps. With the addition of more screen sizes, it’s not getting any easier. Thankfully, Apple is also offering us more ways to work with auto layout. Here I’m gonna take an introductory look at the an API introduced in iOS 9, NSLayoutAnchor. I’ll show … Read More
Rendering Rails Collections (The Smart Way)
This week I was working on a Rails application and stumbled across a really cool trick for rendering collections. As per the usual, it involves a little Rails magic as you’ll see. This trick will clean up a lot of your views and adheres to our coveted DRY convention. Imagine you’re working on an application and you’ve got a collection … Read More
How to Get started with Redis Today
What is a Redis? Why would I wanna use it today? You might’ve asked those questions and if not I’ll answer them for you anyway. The formal definition of Redis according to redis.io is… Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, … Read More
Consuming a Rails API using Alamofire
Making network requests in today’s world is a requirement to be successful in the App Store. You might be familiar with the Apple API NSUrlSession or the Swift version UrlSession to make those requests. They get the job done but other libraries have boldly come forward to make the task easier such as Alamofire. I’ll be using Alamofire to show … Read More