From tweet to polished animation — The following tweet inspired me to finish an animation I had planned for one of my apps. The end result was better than I expected. In Emoji Stickers, every time you select an emoji they fly into your canvas. This animation was just a straight…

iOS 13 brings new dynamism to your apps. — Last year at Shopify we started developing the All-new Point of Sale. There was a small problem, given that all screens are presented full screen to the user we needed the ability to distinguish a modal screen versus the rest. iOS 13 had a…

Interface Builder is amazing for building UI. Code is great for extensibility. Why not use both? — I have a long-running joke in my Twitter bio about fighting in the great Storyboards vs Code wars. Using things like Storyboards is a hot topic among iOS developers. There have been many before it: Automatic Reference Counting vs Manual Memory Management. Auto Layout vs Manual Layout. Swift vs Objective-C.

People make mistakes. Let’s use allow undoing. — You have accidentally shaken your phone and noticed that little alert screen that says “Undo [something]”. In this story we are going to implement Undo and Redo actions in an iOS app. By now you are making all your screens using a declarative and functional approach, right? 😉 If not…

AKA Container Views are great. — One of the first things we learn as iOS developers is that each screen is supposed to be one view controller, and that view controllers in general are very expensive to create. In fact, if you have used UINavigationController or UISplitViewController before. You are already making multi view controller…

Extending GitHub with an army of NodeJS powered robots. — GitHub is without a doubt the place for Open Source Software. But, lacks a fair deal of “power” features to take your projects to the next level. It’s also true that no company can implement 100% of the features its customer desire. Smart companies will create core functionality required for…

Swiping right on simpler code 😏 — UIDynamics have been available since iOS 7, and its a very powerful tool that allow us to create complex interactions pretty simply. For example, the iPad’s Picture on Picture feature is done using UIFieldBehavior, maybe we will cover that in another article. In this article we will explore recreating the…

Creating an app from scratch — FunctionalTableData a library built by Shopify which implements a functional renderer for UITableView and UICollectionView. Massively simplifying how we build UI in iOS. Part 1 We go through the basics of FunctionalTableData and how we can use CellConfigType to make UITableViewCell completely reusable and independent. Building apps with FunctionalTableData (Part 1) Modernizing UITableViewCell and UICollectionViewCell.medium.com