by Steven Huey | Jul 5, 2017 |
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:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/z7DYC_zbZCM
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rIPfpGCxONQ
https://www.youtube.com/embed/NodGjd3C0SQ
by Steven Huey | Apr 24, 2017 |
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. (more…)
by Steven Huey | Apr 10, 2017 |
In my last post I took a look at using the Apollo iOS GraphQL client framework to access a GraphQL backend running on the Graphcool GraphQL mBaaS. Shortly afterwards Brandur Leach, an API engineer at Stripe posted "Is GraphQL the Next Frontier for Web APIs?". In his post Brandur gives a good overview of the current API development space, compares GraphQL to other technologies, and ultimately puts his support behind GraphQL. The follow-on discussion on Hacker News is a bit mixed, with some comments in support of GraphQL along with a few dismissing it. Some advocate support for both REST-like and GraphQL APIs, given that with a sensibly designed backend, support for both is possible with too much additional work. Stripe has a popular REST API that is used by a lot of developers, given Brandur’s opinions, it will be interesting to see if they take this hybrid approach and start offering a GraphQL interface as well.
Regardless of whether GraphQL will gain more traction compared to other approaches or not, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the client side of things and get a better understanding of how the Apollo iOS framework and apollo-codegen tool work. (more…)
by Steven Huey | Mar 27, 2017 |
While researching mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) offerings for a client project, I came across Graphcool which provides a GraphQL backend for mobile or web apps. 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. To get a better feel for the tech and tools involved, I decided to update the ALAirports sample project that I’ve used in a few blog posts to use Graphcool as a backend for the airport data. (more…)
by Steven Huey | Mar 6, 2017 |
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.
(more…)
