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.

Model-View-Controller in iOS: A Blueprint for Better Apps

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Since the introduction of SwiftUI, I have seen many developers write all their code inside views. Unfortunately, the simplicity of the framework seems to encourage a return of many poor practices.

But you do not build robust, maintainable apps by gluing together random pieces of code.

Sure, you can search on Google for specific tasks, copy and paste some code into your project and make it work, somehow.

That works if your app is small and simple. But as soon as you go beyond basic tutorials, you inevitably get serious problems.

That’s why the MVC and MVVM patterns exist. In this article, we will see how they apply to SwiftUI.

Protocol-Oriented Programming: The Best Tool of Expert iOS Developers

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After the introduction of protocol extensions in Swift, Apple started pushing protocol-oriented programming.

Even if it was a new paradigm, it quickly got widespread adoption in Swift programming and iOS development. 

This is not a surprise. Protocol-oriented programming is a highly flexible paradigm with many benefits. One of my favorite applications is to create well-structured network requests.

Protocol-oriented programming solves many of the problems of object-oriented programming. Moreover, it works great with Swift’s value types, i.e., structures and enumerations.

For loops in Swift: a Detailed List of the Most Practical Uses

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For loops are a fundamental construct of programming, and even more so of making iOS apps. If you want to become an iOS developer, they are a necessary tool you need to have in your toolbox.

But more important than simply understanding how they work, is to know how to use them for the different tasks you will meet in iOS development.

So, the aim of this article is not only to show you how Swift for loops work, but how to use them to solve the most common programming problems.

UITableview: The Essential Solution for Scrolling iOS Interfaces

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Table views are a fundamental component of almost any iOS app. But most developers don’t use them when they should or get their architecture wrong. 

Table views are more versatile than you might think.

For example, many developers make their life harder using a scroll view when a UITableView would be a better choice.

Finally, architecture is crucial for table views. The code of the table view data source often ends inside view controllers when it should go into a separate class.

Even though Apple introduced SwiftUI at WWDC 2019, you won’t be able to use it in your apps until a large portion of users gets on iOS 13.

Until then, you need to know the right approach to using table views with data sources and delegates.

Functional Programming in Swift: an Unusual yet Powerful Paradigm

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Since the introduction of Swift, the iOS community has been buzzing with the words functional programming.

That’s because many features of Swift were inspired by the ones you find in functional programming languages.

These features make some tasks easier. One example is easily configurable callbacks for network requests.

While Swift is not a functional language, we can draw many lessons from functional programming to write better Swift code in our iOS apps.

Unwind Segues Step-by-Step (and 4 Reasons to Use Them)

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Unwind segues in iOS can be quite confusing.

Unlike their forward counterpart, they are based on a more complicated mechanism and different rules. That usually complicates their setup.

Moreover, many wonder why you should use an unwind segue when you can dismiss a view controller with a single line of code.

I will answer all these questions in this article.

Passing Data Between View Controllers in iOS: The Definitive Guide

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Many iOS developers make serious architectural mistakes when passing data between view controllers.

There are many ways to do this, but they are not all good. Only a few of them are the best practices.

Quick and easy solutions like singletons often lead to severe problems you will discover only later.

If you want to be a skilled iOS developer, you need to know the architecture behind view controller communication.

In this article, I will show you the best practices to pass data both forward backward. We will also discuss some advanced techniques, and the solutions you should not use.