iOS Posts
I recently attended an event at Apple London for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which spurred me to make my app Personal Best more accessible.
Read more »I’m working on growing my workout-tracking app Personal Best, and as part of that I wanted to run an A/B test on two different paywall designs to see which one performed best. I’ve never done this in my apps before, and I was unsure how. I like to keep third-party libraries in my apps to a minimum, so I was reluctant to use something like Mixpanel if I didn’t absolutely have to.
Read more »In what’s now become a yearly tradition, here’s my end of year review for 2024. I’ll talk about how my apps performed, what I learned, and what I’m looking forward to in 2025.
Read more »Four months ago I wrote about a Taylor Swift trivia app I’d made as an experiment. The idea was to spend a small amount of time building a quiz app and seeing how it performs. At the time, I wrote “If it does well, it’ll be very easy for me adapt it to make more trivia apps about other topics (e.g. a football quiz, movies quiz, and so on).”
Read more »In my quest for more revenue from my app business, I’ve made a new app: a Taylor Swift quiz.
Read more »I started building for Apple platforms in 2020 when SwiftUI was on the bleeding edge and lacked a lot of features. Since then it’s been great seeing it improve every year to be able to do more and more.
Read more »In my 2023 in review I set myself a goal to release two new apps this year. Here’s the first one.
Read more »In my day job I’m currently a front-end web developer working with JavaScript, React, Webpack, and so on.
Read more »Since I became an indie developer in 2020 I’ve written an end of year review each year about how my apps performed. Here’s 2023’s edition.
Read more »My workout insights app Personal Best includes a lot of date formatting for displaying workouts and leaderboards, which was a little unwieldy when initially written. iOS 15 brought a new Formatter API to Swift that makes it simpler to format data, and I’ve now migrated over to it (two years after launch 😅). Here’s how to take advantage of it and make a custom formatter.
Read more »At the end of last year I set myself a goal of doubling Personal Best’s recurring revenue. At the time I felt like this struck a good balance between challenging while still realistically achievable.
Read more »Since I graduated university in 2011 I’ve always had a full-time job, working at a few different companies, and the longest I’ve ever had between roles was a five week gap between ending one job and starting another in 2017.
Read more »I’ve been an independent iOS app developer since April 2020, when I launched Personal Best, my workout insights app. Since then I’ve added Taylor’s Version, and I’m currently working on a third app.
Read more »For the last two years I’ve written something about how my apps developed and performed throughout the year, along with my goals for the next year (see 2021 and 2020).
Read more »My workout tracking app Personal Best includes widgets for tracking your workouts from your home and lock screens using WidgetKit.
Read more »My friends know that I’m not only a fan of the Swift programming language, I’m also a huge fan of Taylor Swift. Seriously, check out my Spotify Wrapped from 2021:
Read more »In late 2020 I wrote a guide about turning SwiftUI views into images. This solution worked but it came with some limitations:
Read more »This time last year I wrote a post about how I made my workout-tracking app Personal Best and my goals for the coming year. Now we’re approaching the end of 2021, here’s a reflection on how things have gone.
Read more »Recently I added the ability to share directly with Instagram Stories to my workout-tracking app Personal Best. Here’s how to do it. This tutorial is tailored to SwiftUI, but the code is generic enough that it could easily be applied to a UIKit app.
Read more »As of March 2021, SwiftUI has a built-in map view but it’s quite simple, only supporting basic annotations.
Read more »Haptic feedback is a huge part of iOS and many apps use it well to add subtle feedback to certain actions.
Read more »SwiftUI doesn’t yet have an easy way to access the camera or photo library. hackingwithswift.com already has a great tutorial on how to access the camera from SwiftUI.
Read more »Occasionally in an iOS app you’ll do something asynchronous, calling a completion handler when it’s done, like this:
Read more »Swift’s Error protocol is commonly used across Apple’s APIs to represent failure states.
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Read more »Update: I now have a much-better way to do this and this post should be considered deprecated. See a better way to create images from SwiftUI views for the new-and-improved solution.
Read more »Since iOS 14, SwiftUI has included components for adding maps to your apps.
Read more »I came to SwiftUI from the React world, where it’s common to pass views (components in React terminology) to other views:
Read more »Swift has long had the ability to omit argument labels to aid readability:
Read more »SwiftUI 2 comes with a Map component, for displaying views from Apple Maps in your apps.
Read more »Here’s a SwiftUI list with a section header:
Read more »I keep running into an issue in SwiftUI where some text truncates where I don’t expect it to. Here’s an example from Personal Best’s onboarding screen:
Read more »Note: This article was written for iOS 13. iOS 14 has support for page controls built in. There is also now iPages, a great third-party library you can use for this.
Read more »In SwiftUI, you can achieve most UI needs without ever explicitly checking for dark mode, thanks to semantic colours built into the platform and the ability to define our own semantic colours that automatically adapt to dark mode.
Read more »When building a watchOS extension for my iPhone app Personal Best, I couldn’t figure out why querying the HealthKit store for workouts was only returning 25 results, as opposed to over 700 on iPhone.
Read more »Recently I’ve been trying to use HKObserver to monitor queries from HealthKit in the background. I wrote a simple integration where my app would print to the console every time a new workout was recorded. However, it was never triggered, except when I opened my app in the foreground.
Apple’s human interface guidelines specify that tap targets should be at least 44x44pt to ensure they’re easily tappable.
Read more »@EnvironmentObject is handy for passing data between views in SwiftUI. Hacking With Swift has an excellent guide on how to use it, but when I followed it, one some of my views it just wasn’t working correctly.