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.

Books That Will Improve Your Career, Freelancing and Business making Swift Apps for iOS

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When I started freelancing a few years ago, things did not go well at the beginning.

I started freelancing at a moment in which I was not happy with my employer and I was looking for another job. Back then a friend told me that there was a lot of work freelancing as an iOS developer.

That was what convinced me to make the sudden jump. But it turned out to be quite different.

How to Persist Data in iOS Apps Using Property Lists and the Correct Architecture for Handling Persistent Storage

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Many iOS developers seem to go for very complex storage solutions when iOS offers very quick and easy ones that are much better for many tasks.

I myself made such mistake in the past. When the iOS SDK first came out I decided to make a little game for the iPhone. It was a little card game and as such it had to store the values for each card as well as information about the deck and cards the player collected. And I used the worst solution possible.

Which storage technologies are available in iOS and which ones you should use

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Sometimes it is hard to know which technology to use in iOS for a specific task.

Storing data is indeed one of these cases. When I wrote my first app, a diet app for the Mac when the iPhone did not exist yet, I used Core Data to store its data (macOS and iOS share the same technologies and frameworks). Looking back, I think that was probably the right choice at the time, given the kind of data the app handled. But back then I had no idea and no way to tell. I picked Core Data just because I heard other developers talking about it and I didn’t know any other way. When it came to store static data in the app, though, I definitely made the wrong choice.

How to Start your Business on the App Store and Become an Indie iOS Developer

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Ten years ago I moved my first steps developing apps for Apple platforms. Like many others, I had the dream to become an indie developer, make my own apps and be independent one day. It all started when I saw a presentation about being an indie developer by Will Shipley. I shared it with a friend and soon he came back to me with an idea for a Mac app (the iPhone still didn’t exist back then). At that time he was trying to follow the Zone Diet, which is a pretty complicated diet requiring a lot of calculations. So he though that an app to help people follow that diet would be a good business idea.

The common lifecycle of a view controller

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View controllers have a central role in iOS apps and build the skeleton of every app you make. This is because each screen of the app is represented by a single view controller. Because of this central role they have, they are at the center of a lot of activity and perform many duties during their lifetime.

The Complete Guide to Understanding Swift Optionals

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Since the introduction of Swift, optionals seem to have used a lot of confusion for people learning the language. I have to admit that at the beginning it took me a while too to wrap my mind around them. The cause was that I didn’t take the required time to fully understand them.

How to Keep your View Controllers Small for a Better Code Base

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iOS apps are built according to a widespread programming pattern: the model-view-controller pattern (or MVC). The MVC is a high-level pattern used to describe the global architecture of an application and to classify objects according to the general roles they play. In MVC objects tend to be more reusable and programs are more easy to change.