Making the most of optionals – part 2
In the full tutorial…
- Multiple nil coalescing
- Faster force unwrapping
- Optionals are functors and monads
- From Optional to Result
- Challenges
Subscribe to Hacking with Swift+ today
Hacking with Swift+ delivers high-quality tutorials for subscribers, with each tutorial coming as a 4K Ultra HD video and in text form so you can read or watch – whatever works best for you.
So, you can get this full video and article as well as all other subscriber-only tutorials and all future tutorials – all by subscribing to Hacking with Swift+ today.
Membership includes…
All HWS+ tutorials as both text and 4K video
Downloadable projects and learning challenges
Our massive Ultimate Portfolio App series
Free gifts for every year of your subscription
An ad-free experience everywhere on the site
Video solutions for the 100 Days of SwiftUI
Access to my monthly app building livestreams
A 20% discount on all my books year-round
Access to an exclusive forum for subscribers
Videos from Hacking with Swift Live 2020
More from Hacking with Swift+
42:32
FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING
FREE: Transforming data with map()
In this article we’re going to look at the map() function, which transforms one thing into another thing. Along the way we’ll also be exploring some core concepts of functional programming, so if you read no other articles in this course at least read this one!
27:33
INTERMEDIATE SWIFT
FREE: Understanding assertions
Assertions allow us to have Swift silently check the state of our program at runtime, but if you want to get them right you need to understand some intricacies. In this article I’ll walk you through the five ways we can make assertions in Swift, and provide clear advice on which to use and when.
19:50
SWIFTUI SPECIAL EFFECTS
FREE: Shadows and glows
SwiftUI gives us a modifier to make simple shadows, but if you want something more advanced such as inner shadows or glows, you need to do extra work. In this article I’ll show you how to get both those effects and more in a customizable, flexible way.
33:12
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
FREE: Making your app accessible
It is my firm belief that every iOS app should be usable to everyone, and putting in the work to make your app function well no matter who is using it says a lot about the kind of developer you are.
14:26
NETWORKING
FREE: User-friendly network access
Anyone can write Swift code to fetch network data, but much harder is knowing how to write code to do it respectfully. In this article we’ll look at building a considerate network stack, taking into account the user’s connection, preferences, and more.
36:18
HIGH-PERFORMANCE APPS
FREE: Using memoization to speed up slow functions
In this article you’ll learn how memoization can dramatically boost the performance of slow functions, and how easy Swift makes it thanks to its generics and closures.
20:01
INTERMEDIATE SWIFT
FREE: Understanding generics – part 1
Generics are one of the most powerful features of Swift, allowing us to write code once and reuse it in many ways. In this article we’ll explore how they work, why adding constraints actually helps us write more code, and how generics help solve one of the biggest problems in Swift.
14:17
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
FREE: Ultimate Portfolio App: Introduction
While I’m sure you’re keen to get started programming immediately, please give me a few minutes to outline the goals of this course and explain why it’s different from other courses I’ve written.
23:07
ADVANCED SWIFT
FREE: Making the most of optionals
Swift’s optionals are implemented as simple enums, with just a little compiler magic sprinkled around as syntactic sugar. However, they do much more than people realize, and in this article I’m going to demonstrate some of their power features that can really help you write better code – and blow your mind along the way.
6:52
FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING
FREE: Functional programming in Swift: Introduction
Before you dive in to the first article in this course, I want to give you a brief overview of our goals, how the content is structured, as well as a rough idea of what you can expect to find.
3:54
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
FREE: Interview questions: Introduction
Getting ready for a job interview is tough work, so I’ve prepared a whole bunch of common questions and answers to help give you a jump start. But before you get into them, let me explain the plan in more detail…
24:11
ADVANCED SWIFT
FREE: How to use phantom types in Swift
Phantom types are a powerful way to give the Swift compiler extra information about our code so that it can stop us from making mistakes. In this article I’m going to explain how they work and why you’d want them, as well as providing lots of hands-on examples you can try.
14:20
INTERMEDIATE SWIFTUI
FREE: Creating a custom property wrapper using DynamicProperty
It’s not hard to make a basic property wrapper, but if you want one that automatically updates the body property like @State you need to do some extra work. In this article I’ll show you exactly how it’s done, as we build a property wrapper capable of reading and writing documents from our app’s container.
31:55
DATA STRUCTURES
FREE: Trees
Trees are an extraordinarily simple, extraordinarily useful data type, and in this article we’ll make a complete tree data type using Swift in just a few minutes. But rather than just stop there, we’re going to do something quite beautiful that I hope will blow your mind while teaching you something useful.
38:12
SOLUTIONS
FREE: Challenge 1: Converter
This early challenge day asks you to build a converter app that’s able to move between any two similar units, such as kilometers and miles. Let’s solve it now, then we’ll take it further, and then we’ll take it even further…
32:08
CUSTOM SWIFTUI COMPONENTS
FREE: Creating a WaveView to draw smooth waveforms
In this article I’m going to walk you through building a WaveView with SwiftUI, allowing us to create beautiful waveform-like effects to bring your user interface to life.
37:26
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Cleaning up view code
Although our SwiftUI layouts conform to the View protocol, if you were to try to think about them in MVC terms I’d say they were more like controllers. And like controllers from UIKit, we need to put in some work to keep SwiftUI views lean – let’s look at this now…
1:01:16
ALGORITHMS
Flocking with boids
If you watch a flock of birds you’ll see it exhibits all sorts of complex behaviors as they swarm around in the air – they often stay together but not too close, they move in the same direction but also seem to change direction at the same time. In this article we will create flocking behavior in SwiftUI, using Craig Reynolds’ classic boids algorithm.
18:42
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Adding and deleting
At this point you can get a basic idea for the UI of our app, but it has a fatal flaw: although we can add test data, we can’t do the same for user data. Let’s fix that now – there’s more to it than you might think!
31:09
ULTIMATE PORTFOLIO APP
Cleaning up CloudKit, part 2
The second part of cleaning up CloudKit involves tackling error handling head on, and along the way I’ll show you a useful trick for making this process easier. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating that getting error handling right is the key to a great CloudKit app!
