Making the most of Foundation
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Using dates safely and effectively
Working with dates in software is hard, and if you don’t understand why then think about time zones, think about leap years, or think about how it’s the year 2563 in the Thai calendar. Apple gives us many tools for making them easier but they can be hard to discover, so in this article I’m going to try to provide some clear guidance for what to use and when.
Converting measurements safely
Apple’s Foundation framework makes it easy for us to convert any kind of measurement into any other kind of measurement. In this article I’ll show you how to make the most of these APIs, but also why it’s so useful that they work with Swift features such as operator overloading, plus important protocols such as Comparable
, Equatable
, and Codable
.
Storing preferences efficiently
Apple’s UserDefaults
system lets us store small amounts of user data for our app, which might sound simple but it’s deceptively powerful. In this article I’ll show you the correct way to create initial preferences, how to share preferences across applications, how to synchronize data with iCloud, and why this is a case where property wrappers probably aren’t a good solution.
There are lots of UI mistakes we can make in programming, but unless our bugs actually get in the way of functionality most users don’t care that much. But there is one exception, and we’re going to look at it here: in this article I’ll show you how to handle names correctly – the most personal data of all.