Codable is a protocol that was introduced in Swift 4 to make the serialization and deserialization of data into and out of Swift structures a breeze. This post assumes some knowledge of how to use Codable so if you’re unfamiliar with the basics it’s worth reading Encoding and Decoding Custom Types first as a primer. With that being said, let’s continue.

Imagine you have the following JSON you wish to deserialize:

Here’s the series of Swift structures you might write to deserialize the data:

Then using JSONDecoder decode the data as follows:

Very quickly you’ll run into…

We’re all familiar with the situation — we’ve implemented the greatest new feature our app has ever seen. It gets to QA and the first thing they do is rapidly bash the button that pushes the next UIViewController five times in a row.

Mechanical switches typically operate using two metallic contacts which when the switch is depressed come into contact within one another thus completing a circuit. These contacts are usually made of a springy metal which may bounce apart from one another once or several times before coming into final contact with one another. This effect can result in…

Dynamic Type is a feature that was introduced in iOS 7 allowing users to change the default font size used across iOS. It is intended predominantly to support visually impaired users but in practice, there are many iOS users who simply prefer a smaller/larger reading size for a variety of reasons.

Over successive releases of iOS, Apple has made numerous improvements to assist developers with the implementation of accessibility features. Each year at WWDC, Apple has held sessions on accessibility improvements and pushed developers to develop more inclusive experiences through the implementation of assistive technologies. For example, apps which have…

When an emergency arises, it can be beneficial to have a mechanism in place to gently transition users to the latest app update. However, such a mechanism might require a backend solution to let app users know when an update is released which has the potential to be costly both in terms of development overhead and maintenance. Where the choice is between developing such a solution or delivering new functionality to the user, the latter is likely to win out meaning that most apps have little or no means of migrating users should the worst happen.

When it comes to…

I recently created a game called Heartbreaker as an Easter Egg for our app. The game had a gradiented background and whilst at the time of making the game there wasn’t enough time to animate the background gradient, it was a challenge I was keen to return to when done. This article is intended to provide an overview of animating gradients on iOS as well as illustrating some of the challenges encountered along the way.

If you are a developer using Git as part of your workflow on a regular basis then you’re probably familiar with the concept of using SSH keys to push commits to a remote repository (if you use a URL of the form ssh://) potentially hosted on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket etc. Alternatively, you may use a username and password to access your remote repository over HTTPS. Did you know though that whilst your credentials identify you to the remote server (and thus determine the actions you may perform within the remote repo), they do nothing to identify your commits as belonging…

Recently I was thinking about how I would go about implementing an Easter egg within an iOS app and how it could be found by the user. If you’re not familiar with the concept of an Easter egg — an Easter egg is a fun feature hidden within an application that has to be discovered by the user.

In the early days of console gaming it was common for video games to contain cheat codes to unlock Easter eggs or other features of the game such as a level select screen or god mode. Usually these were created by the…

I recently wrote an article on how iOS detects captive portals on connecting to new Wi-Fi networks before presenting a web view allowing the user to sign in or register. This is a scenario that will be familiar to most people who have connected to a public Wi-Fi network in a hotel, bar or coffee shop etc. If you aren’t yet familiar with how this works then Solving the Captive Portal Problem on iOS provides a useful background to this article.

Apple’s Reachability sample code has been used as the de facto starting point for detecting network access in third…