Matteo Manferdini

Matteo has been developing apps for iOS since 2008. He has been teaching iOS development best practices to hundreds of students since 2015 and he is the developer of Vulcan, a macOS app to generate SwiftUI code. Before that he was a freelance iOS developer for small and big clients, including TomTom, Squla, Siilo, and Layar. Matteo got a master's degree in computer science and computational logic at the University of Turin. In his spare time he dances and teaches tango.

A Comprehensive Guide to URLs in Swift and SwiftUI

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URLs are omnipresent in today’s world, and iOS apps are no exception.

The URLs you use in Swift can identify different resources. The most common examples are web content, local files, and REST API endpoints.

The way you handle a URL in Swift depends on two things. The resource it identifies and how you manage the resource in the architecture of your app.

The Best and Fastest Ways to Install Xcode on your Mac

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The easiest way to install Xcode is using the Mac App Store.

But that’s not necessarily the best way.

While you can install Xcode with a simple click, using the Mac App Store is very slow, and the download might hang indefinitely or return cryptic errors.

The best alternative way to install Xcode is to download it from Apple’s website. If you are proficient enough, using the command line is the fastest.

In this article, we will look at all of the alternative ways to install Xcode, how to speed up the process, and how to resolve disk space problems. We’ll also look at the Windows alternative to Xcode.

Powerful Advanced Swift Techniques for Complex Apps

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Any iOS developer, at some point, feels the need to make the step from basic to advanced concepts.

You can get a lot of mileage from the fundamentals of Swift and iOS development.

But working on complex projects demands a new set of tools if you want your code to be reusable and remain at the same time maintainable and testable.

If you are looking to expand your Swift knowledge into more advanced topics and understand why you would need such concepts, this article is for you.

Become an iOS Developer in 2022: The Ultimate Guide

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The mobile market is exploding, and iOS developers are in high demand.

The talent shortage keeps driving salaries higher and higher, even for entry-level positions. Software development is also one of the lucky jobs that you can do remotely. It’s understandable then that more and more people want to become iOS developers.

Money and freedom are great, of course, but they are not everything. Many of us make iOS apps to create something we are proud of and make a difference in many people’s lives.

Becoming an iOS developer takes some effort, though. So it’s crucial to focus on the right things and not waste time on useless activities. That’s why I wrote this detailed, step-by-step guide.

The Strategic SwiftUI Data Flow Guide (+ Infographic)

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SwiftUI offers several mechanisms to pass data between views.

Such abundance can make it hard to decide which data flow mechanism fits any particular situation.

Those decisions cannot be taken in isolation. As in many other cases, we need to keep an app’s architecture in mind to make the correct choice.

MVVM in iOS with SwiftUI (Detailed Example + Pitfalls)

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Since the introduction of SwiftUI, the MVVM pattern has seen a new renaissance. Many developers believe that this particular pattern fits well with the SwiftUI data flow.

MVVM certainly has some good ideas, but it also brings along problems because of the various discording interpretations of the pattern and its rigidity.

In this article, we will see how MVVM fits in iOS apps written in SwiftUI, how to take advantage of its benefits, and how to avoid its problems.

JSON Decoding in Swift with Codable: A Practical Guide

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Encoding and decoding data is a fundamental part of iOS apps.

That is especially true for the JSON data we get from REST APIs.

In the past, decoding JSON in iOS apps required a lot of boilerplate code and sometimes fancy techniques.

But thanks to the Codable protocols introduced of Swift 4, today we have a native and idiomatic way to encode and decode data.

The Codable protocols allow for simple JSON decoding that can sometimes take only a couple of lines of code. But they also allow for more sophisticated techniques when you have special needs.

We will explore all that in this article.