Wrap up
You will use UserDefaults in your projects. That isn't some sort of command, just a statement of inevitability. If you want to save any user settings, or if you want to save program settings, it's just the best place for it. And I hope you'll agree it is (continuing a trend!) easy to use and flexible, particularly when your own classes conform to Codable.
As you saw, the NSCoding protocol is also available. Yes, it takes extra work to use, and can be quite annoying when your data types have lots of properties you need to save, but it does have the added benefit of Objective-C compatibility if you have a mixed codebase.
One proviso you ought to be aware of: please don't consider UserDefaults to be safe, because it isn't. If you have user information that is private, you should consider writing to the keychain instead – something we'll look at in project 28.
Review what you learned
Anyone can sit through a tutorial, but it takes actual work to remember what was taught. It’s my job to make sure you take as much from these tutorials as possible, so I’ve prepared a short review to help you check your learning.
Click here to review what you learned in project 12.
Challenge
One of the best ways to learn is to write your own code as often as possible, so here are three ways you should try your new knowledge to make sure you fully understand what’s going on:
- Modify project 1 so that it remembers how many times each storm image was shown – you don’t need to show it anywhere, but you’re welcome to try modifying your original copy of project 1 to show the view count as a subtitle below each image name in the table view.
- Modify project 2 so that it saves the player’s highest score, and shows a special message if their new score beat the previous high score.
- Modify project 5 so that it saves the current word and all the player’s entries to
UserDefaults, then loads them back when the app launches.
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Share your success!
One of the most effective motivators of success is sharing your progress with other people – when you tell folks what you're doing and what you've learned, it encourages you to come back for more, which in turn will help you reach your app development goals faster.
So, now that you've done all the hard work it's time to share your success: tell folks that you've completed this project, either by clicking the button below to start composing a tweet, or by writing your own message from scratch. This will definitely encourage you to keep learning, but it will also help other folks discover my work – thank you!
