Things I wish I knew as a swift beginner

Here's a list of things I wish I had known as a swift beginner, so far the list mainly contains iOS centered swift things because I'm developing for iOS, but this will change as the list grows. Coming from a front end background, I find alot of things I want to do are the same, but different.

Contents

1. Text shadow slows animation
2. UITextField field padding
3. Use SnapKit instead of Autolayout
4. How to set a background image
5. What the equivalent of Javascripts setTimeOut function is in swift
6. How to easily cast firebase data
7. How to pretty format arrays and objects in the console
8. How to use reduce in swift
9. You can also use logical operator in a reduce
10. Swift is more than just iOS development ;) (5, 7, 8 are the only swift-specific things)
11. What the swift equivalent of a void function is and how to type it
12. That grand central dispatch exists

1. Text shadow slows animation

Rendering animations that has or overlaps text with text shadow on will suffer a performance impact. The solution I found was to rasterize the UILabel's layer.

Solution

There is an option to rasterize the layer, effectively mitigating the lag

class MyViewController : UIViewController {
    let label: UILabel = {
        let label = UILabel()
        label.frame = CGRect(x: 150, y: 200, width: 200, height: 20)
        label.text = "Hello World!"
        label.textColor = .black
        label.layer.shadowColor = UIColor.black.cgColor
        label.layer.shadowOpacity = 1;
        label.layer.shadowRadius = 5;
        label.layer.shadowOffset = CGSize(width: 0, height: 2)
        return label
    }()

    override func loadView() {
        let view = UIView()
        view.backgroundColor = .white

        // Rasterize the layer using shouldRasterize and
        // set the rasterizationScale for retina screens
        label.layer.shouldRasterize = true;
        label.layer.rasterizationScale = 2
        
        view.addSubview(label)
        self.view = view
    }
}

2. UITextField field padding

Sometimes you want to add padding to a text field and that's not as straight forward as you'd think.

Solution

Extend UITextField and override the bounding boxes

extension UITextField {
    override open func editingRect(forBounds bounds: CGRect) -> CGRect {
        return bounds.insetBy(dx: 10, dy: 0)
    }

    override open func placeholderRect(forBounds bounds: CGRect) -> CGRect {
        return bounds.insetBy(dx: 10, dy: 0)
    }

    override open func textRect(forBounds bounds: CGRect) -> CGRect {
        return bounds.insetBy(dx: 10, dy: 0)
    }
}

3. Use SnapKit instead of Autolayout

Disclaimer: There's nothing wrong with Autolayout. SnapKit uses it under the hood as pointed out by /u/fear731.
But personally I find SnapKit's syntax more convienient, shorter and easier to understand when I come back to it.

Also Autolayout is backed by the system and should be studied first no matter what. As suggested by /u/and_roman. Which I agree with as I first learn Autolayout before using SnapKit so just diving into SnapKit without have ever used AutoLayout might make things more complicated.

Comparison

/**
 * Autolayout
 */
textView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
textView.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: self.topAnchor, constant: 0).isActive = true
textView.leftAnchor.constraint(equalTo: self.leftAnchor, constant: 10).isActive = true
textView.rightAnchor.constraint(equalTo: self.anotherTextView.leftAnchor).isActive = true

/**
 * Snap Kit
 */
textView.snp.makeConstraints {
  make in
  make.top.equalTo(self.snp.top)
  make.left.equalTo(self.snp.left).offsetBy(10)
  make.right.equalTo(self.anotherTextView.snp.left)
}

4. How to set a background image

In this example I am using SnapKit, but you can use Autolayout if you wanted to.

Solution

class YourViewController: UIViewController {
  let backgroundImage = UIImageView(
    image: UIImage(named: "your-background-image")
  )

  init() {
    super.init(nibName: nil, bundle: nil)
    self.setupBackground()
  }

  /**
    * This sets up the background for the screen
    */
  fileprivate func setupBackground() {
    view.addSubview(backgroundImage)
    backgroundImage.contentMode = UIView.ContentMode.scaleAspectFill
    backgroundImage.snp.makeConstraints {
      make in
      make.margins.equalTo(view)
    }
  }
}

5. What the equivalent of Javascripts setTimeOut function is in swift

I use setTimeOut in javascript sometimes to delay things. It pretty easy to do in Swift, but the code is a little different.

  Timer.scheduledTimer(
    withTimeInterval: 1,
    repeats: false,
    block: {
      timer in
      // ...Your code goes here
    }
  )

A better way of doing this was recommended by /u/halleys_comet69 How elegant and succinct.

DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter(deadline: .now() + 1) {
    print("This is delayed.")
}

6. How to easily cast firebase data

If you're only storing string values in your firebase database then this can help you to convert the return snapshop to a dictionary.

  self.ref?
      .child("your/data/path")
      .observeSingleEvent(
        of: .value,
        with: {
          (snapshot) in
          guard let data = snapshot.value as? [String : String] else {
            return
          }
          // data["yourProp"]
        }
      )

7. How to pretty format arrays and objects in the console

I was using print alot of the time to output data. But actually, there's also a command called dump. dump will format the object for you.

// Example output of print
[['a'], ['b']]

// Example output of dump
[
  ['a'],
  ['b']
]

8. How to use reduce in swift

Reduce in swift isn't hard, it's just a different syntax as pointed out by /u/and_roman. I wasted quite alot of time because the stuff I found had rather convoluted examples. So here's a simple example of concatenating hello world in Javascript and how the same thing can be done in Swift.

// Javascript version
const helloWorldArray = ["Hello", "World"];
const joinedString = helloWorldArray
  .reduce(
    (endResult, value) => `${endResult} ${value}`,
    "Result:"
  );
console.log(joinedString);

// Swift version
let helloWorldArray = ["Hello", "World"]
let joinedString = helloWorldArray
    .reduce("Result: ") { "\($0) \($1)" }
print(joinedString)

Here is a better example by /u/DonaldPShimoda. The (1) is the initial value of the reduction.

let numbers = [3, 5, 2, 5, 6, 2, 4]
let product = numbers.reduce(1) { (previousNumber, currentNumber) in previousNumber * currentNumber }
print(product)

9. You can also use logical operator in a reduce

I learnt this off /u/anymbryne. Here's the same example as above. Very cool stuff! ❤️

let numbers = [3, 5, 2, 5, 6, 2, 4]
let product = numbers.reduce(1, *)
print(product)

10. Swift is more than just iOS development ;) (5, 7, 8 are the only swift-specific things)

/u/Terrible_Umpire Pointed this one out to me 😙

11. What the swift equivalent of a void function is and how to type it

I had trouble typing void functions in the beginnning, it wasn't as easy to find an example as I had hoped. So just putting this here for convienience.

// Javascript
const logHelloWorld = () => console.log('Hello World');

// Swift
let logHelloWorld: (() -> Void) = {
    () in
    print("Hello World")
}

12. That Grand Central Dispatch exists

I won't go into too much detail about Grand Central Dispatch here as there are better resources for this, for example this post. But I wish I new this existed before I wasted countless hours trying to "speed things up".