Looking Forward to ARKit and AR Apps in iOS 11

Looking Forward to ARKit and AR Apps in iOS 11

At WWDC earlier this month Apple previewed ARKit – it’s initial foray into Augmented Reality or AR. Alongside the intro session at WWDC they published Understanding Augmented Reality which provides a nice overview of how ARKit works, best practices, and its limitations.
Following WWDC the development community has put together a number of great demos that highlight the possibilities and potential of ARKit and the Made with ARKit (@madewithARKit) site has been chronicling some of the best of these.
Here are a few of my favorites…

JSON Parsing, Conversion, and Caching in the Apollo iOS GraphQL Client

JSON Parsing, Conversion, and Caching in the Apollo iOS GraphQL Client

In my last post I took a closer look at how the Apollo iOS GraphQL client executes queries and what the resulting JSON looks like. In this post I’m going to focus on how the JSON is parsed and converted to the native Swift types generated by the apollo-codegen tool and also look at how the Apollo iOS client caches results.

JSON Parsing, Conversion, and Caching in the Apollo iOS GraphQL Client

Exploring GraphQL on iOS

GraphQL is a “query language for your API” developed by Facebook back in 2012 for use in its mobile apps, which in 2015 became a published open source specification and framework. Its development was driven by frustration with the state of REST-like endpoints and development of mobile and web apps to consume them.
I hadn’t worked with GraphQL before, but it looked interesting and wanted to see if we could put it to use in the mobile or web apps we build.

A Quick Core Data Stack with NSPersistentContainer

A Quick Core Data Stack with NSPersistentContainer

One of the longstanding criticisms of Core Data is how much code it takes to setup the infamous Core Data stack in your iOS or macOS app just so that you can create some instances of entities and save them to a persistent store. The frustration has spawned a number of blog posts outlining the latest, greatest way to setup your stack. Not long after the blog posts came the open source projects aimed at reducing the amount of boilerplate you’ve got to write and helping you avoid common mistakes.
With the release of iOS 10 and macOS 10.12 in many cases you can now forget about the blog posts and third party dependencies thanks to NSPersistentContainer. This one is a no-brainer and it would have been nice if Apple had included it back in the days of iOS 3.0 when they introduced Core Data.