tips and tricks

Swift 4 and PromiseKit

Having spent years in AngularJS, using promises to wrap asynchronous calls became an almost daily occurrence. I loved the way asynchronous code could be quickly and easily encapsulated with a quick promise using the $q library. When I made the jump to iOS and Swift, I was left wondering how I could continue working with … Read More

Testing and Debugging Happily with WebStorm, Jest and Create-React-App

Those of us who have worked with JavaScript testing APIs on various platforms shudder every time we think about configuration issues. Whether it’s the test runner, the proper testing API, picking the appropriate mock/spy/stubbing strategy, dealing with async code, it’s always a tad complicated. However, some of my latest frustrations (self-inflicted, of course) center around … Read More

How to fix broken Jest in React 16.4.1 with CRA and debug your jest tests!

Having trouble with running Jest tests once you upgrade to React 16.4.1? Here’s how to fix it. Note, this is a rather time-sensitive post and will be obsolete once the 2.x version of create-react-app is released. But for now, it can help! Also I show you how to debug Jest tests. That part is still useful.

Taking AWS SDK Go 2.0 For A Spin

The Amazon Web Services SDK for Go 2.0 contains a number of enhancements compared to Go v1. Golang is a great programming language for modern cloud native applications. The language provides great facilities for better concurrency, internet content parsing (JSON, XML, etc…), support for HTTP(S), ease of cross-platform compilation, and static binary executable generation, just … Read More

UITableView Swipe Actions in iOS 11

Overview One of the new but little discussed APIs in iOS 11 allows the addition of swipe actions on UITableView rows via the new UISwipeActionsConfiguration class and associated UITableViewDelegate methods. Adding swipe left or swipe right actions is now pretty simple, so lets just dive right in. To try out these new APIs, a very … Read More

Updating text on a Loading spinner with Ionic 3

Ionic has a handy Loading component, typically used to display a spinner and message while some network operation completes or some other work goes on in the background. It works well for simple operations, but falls down for dynamic or multi-step operations. For instance, when you call the LoadingController to set things up, you can … Read More

Changing your iOS App Icon programatically

When iOS 10.3 was released, Apple opened up an API to allow developers to change the app icon for their app programatically. Of course this doesn’t mean you can change it every second like the Clock app, or even every day like the Calendar app. What you can do is change the app icon when … Read More