Apple has recently unveiled a powerful new tool for developers: the Apple Push Notifications Console. This innovative console simplifies the task of sending test notifications to Apple devices using the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).

In the past, testing push notifications on iOS simulators was quite challenging due to certain limitations. Prior to Xcode 14, receiving push notifications in a simulator was not possible and developers had to rely on local simulations using .apns payload files and the simctl push command. We have already seen how to simulate push notifications in a simulator in the article, Simulating remote push notifications in a simulator

However, Xcode 14 allows iOS simulators running on macOS 13 on Macs with Apple silicon or T2 processors to receive remote push notifications just like a physical device.

In the world of programming, tracking variable changes can often turn into a debugging nightmare. In Xcode, you might find yourself frequently relying on breakpoints and manually tracing the changes in your variables’ values. At times, you might also utilize property observers such as didSet and willSet for this purpose.

But what if I tell you, there’s a powerful tool waiting for you to harness its capabilities: Watchpoints. They allow you to monitor a specific variable or memory address for changes, providing invaluable insights into your program’s execution.

Sometimes, we would require a button to show a loader with appropriate text when a long-duration task is done, such as downloading an image. Before iOS 15, we had to write a custom button or do some hacks to show a simple loader or an UIActivityIndicator inside an UIButton. Now, it is not the case anymore. UIButtonConfiguration provides showsActivityIndicator, a simple property using which we can hide/show a loader inside a button.

In iOS 14.0, Apple introduced a new way to pick images from the device’s photo library using PHPickerViewController. (If you are not aware of PHPickerViewController, I strongly recommend you to read about PHPickerViewController first.)

It was WWDC22 week, and I was browsing through my Twitter feed to get some updates about the latest Apple APIs. A person tweeted, “No matter how experienced you are as an iOS developer, you’ll always look it up how to set up a date formatter.” So I humorously replied to the tweet by saying, “Dates are hard 😜 .”

Arrays are one of the most widely used data structures in Swift, and we deal with a lot of array manipulations. One such manipulation is the removal of the last element from an array. The three useful methods to remove an element from an array are dropLast(), popLast(), and removeLast()

Buttons are an essential element in iOS apps. If you are developing an app using UIKit, you will probably use UIButton class to create buttons. Creating a button is a straightforward process, but it becomes problematic when it comes to customizations. Soon you will find yourself writing hacks for achieving your desired result. We all have been there, and we have done it. You are not alone. Luckily, iOS 15.0 gives us a new method to customize Buttons much easier using UIButton.Configuration. Let’s get started!

Deque (should be pronounced as “deck”) is a collection implementing double-ended queues. Deques are similar to arrays, but they have efficient insertions and removal of elements at the beginning and at the end.

Dictionaries are one of the most commonly used data structures. Dictionaries come with keys and values where the keys are unique. Sometimes, there might be a situation where we would want to swap the keys and values of a dictionary. Let’s see how to swap keys and values of a dictionary in swift.

You all might know that async/await is accepted and is available in the main snapshots! Let’s get our hands dirty by trying out some basic example of async/await in Swift.

Apple’s new Apple Silicon (M1 processor) is a beast. The apps open pretty quickly, and the slow Xcode build times are a thing of the past. But what does it have in store for the iOS/macOS developers?

iOS 14.0 brings us many improvements and new APIs using which the developers can write efficient code. One such API is the closure based action API instead of the addTarget method in UIControls. Yes, you heard me right—no more usage of addTarget methods, #selector(), and @objc annotation in front of methods. More importantly, we can write a closure based code using the action handler. Okay, enough talk, let’s dive into the code.

Almost every app requires photos and video access these days. Before iOS 14.0, the iOS developers used UIImagePickerController to access the items from the user’s media library. From iOS 14.0, Apple is providing its developers a brand new way to select images or videos from their apps using PHPickerViewController

One of the most significant features which make an app stand out is localization. When we hear the term localization, the first thing that comes to mind is localizing the text displayed in UILabels, UITextViews, UIButtons, and other UIElements. It is quite straight forward to localize the text in the UIElements, and most of us think that we have localized the app, and it is ready to go! But wait, there is one more area I would like to highlight, and that is the images used in the app. You heard me right. If the images used in the app contain text, then they should be localized as well. Localizing the image assets is slightly different but not so hard.

As a developer, we might use Userdefaults in our apps at some point in time for storing some basic configuration or settings in the app. But as the project gets complex, things can get pretty tough. Especially, when you want to clear all the UserDefaults values from the app. Well, we can use the removeObject method to remove the value for a particular key.

At WWDC 2019, Apple added a brand new API “UICollectionViewCompositionalLayout” to the UIKit. Using this powerful API, we can create complex compositional layouts without writing complicated code. At times, It feels tough to create complex collection view UIs using the UICollectionViewFlowLayout. The UICollectionViewCompositionalLayout API eases the process and guess what you can even support orthogonal scrolling UIs with much ease. Well, it sounds great, but practically we cannot use the UICollectionViewCompositionalLayout API until we drop the support for iOS 12.0 and earlier in our apps. (It is not going to happen for the next few years is what I predict.) So how do we use this API in iOS 12.0 and earlier?

Apple just released Xcode 11.4 beta with tons of features. One of the notable features is simulating remote push notifications in simulators, which means that triggering remote notifications in simulators is now possible.

We all love closures, don’t we? Closures make an iOS developer’s life easy. Well, if it makes it easy, then why am I saying to avoid using closures in Swift structs? The reason is, “Memory leaks and unexpected behaviors.” Wait. What? Memory leak in structs? How could that be possible?

When we hear the term ‘Sorting,’ the algorithms which come to our mind are quicksort, insertion sort, merge sort, bubble sort, heap sort, and other sorting algorithms. We would have used the method sort() to sort elements in an array, in our day to day programming tasks. However, have you ever wondered what algorithm does the method uses to sort the items in Swift? Before Swift 5, it was ‘Introsort,’ but after Swift 5, it is ‘Timsort.’ Timsort is a sorting algorithm, used in programming languages like Python, and Java. I am going to cover mostly about ‘Timsort’ in this article.