Sam Soffes

Network Testing in Swift with DVR

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Networking testing is hard. There’s a few approaches. The most common I’ve seen is stubbing requests. OCMock is a common approach.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of mocks and stubs. At some point you just end up testing your mocks and stubs instead of your real code. When it comes to testing, I want unit tests to test logic and integration tests to test compositions.

I think focusing on testing everything in isolation isn’t great. If you have stuff that is hard to test in isolation, either it should be redesigned to more encapsulated or due to the nature of it, you need to test it at a higher level.

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SyntaxKit

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I sat down to work on Whiskey the other day and go super side tracked. I have this new master plan to greatly improve Whiskey's markdown parsing, but it's a lot of work so I started procrastiworking. I noticed some bugs in SyntaxKit, what I wrote so Whiskey can do code coloring for things other than Markdown, and decided to start fixing them. Because I was procrastiworking, the logical first step was to rewrite it in Swift 2 :)

Since this isn't terribly specific to Whiskey, I decided to open source SyntaxKit. It makes TextMate-style syntax highlighting easy. It works on iOS & OS X. There aren't any dependencies besides system frameworks. Boom.

Carthage is the recommended way to install SyntaxKit. Add the following to your Cartfile:

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Automatic UI Updates with Value Types in Swift

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Value types are one of my favorite things in Swift. At first, I was resistant. It’s a much different way of thinking. Let’s look at a simple example that really shows the power.

I was recently working on a little control for entering in numbers on Apple Watch. Here's the code:

It's really straight forward. There's a little bit of math to insert or delete numbers. It's not bad though. Here's how you use it:

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Redacted for Mac Launch

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Yesterday, Redacted for Mac hit the App Store. It's this little app I've been working on here and there to quickly hide parts of an image. Here's a one minute video demo if you want the quick rundown.

All I did was tweet the video about it a few days before it came out and then tweeted that it was out early the morning it was ready. Someone else submitted it to Product Hunt after seeing my tweet. The results were pretty shocking!

For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!

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