A developer's rambling
My girlfriend is part of a bowling league and every week she writes her scores down on a piece of paper. After seeing her do this for many seasons of bowling I’ve decided I would build her a simple mobile application that she can enter these scores into.
If you have a iPhone with iOS 15.6 or higher you can direct message me on twitter (with your email address, and first and last name) and I’ll invite you to the TestFlight. I’m planning on running this TestFlight beta until mid November 2022.
When you have to use UserDefaults to share data between a core app and a widget you have to do a couple of things.
Inside of the project Signing & Capabilities use the Add Capabilities button to add App Group. You need to do this while selecting both the app target and the widget target.
extension UserDefaults {
static let custom: UserDefaults = {
let appGroupId = "group.tech.justins.BowlingScoreTracker"
return UserDefaults(suiteName: appGroupId)!
}()
}Now anywhere in the app where you set or get from UserDefaults just use .custom instead of .default. And that will synchronize across both of them.
Apple’s built in stepper allows you to only have one step increment value, I’ve designed on that allows for two different increment values. Initial version supported 1 and 10 for the step values and is tied to an integer.
import SwiftUI
struct ContentView: View {
@State var score: Int = 0
var min: Int = 0
var max: Int = 100
var template: String = "Score: %@"
var body: some View {
Form {
Text("Expanded Stepper Example")
HStack {
Text(String(format: template, score.formatted()))
Spacer()
Button("-10") {
score = score - 10
}
.disabled(score - 10 < min)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
Button("-1") {
score = score - 1
}
.disabled(score - 1 < min)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
Button("+1") {
score = score + 1
}
.disabled(score + 1 > max)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
Button("+10") {
score = score + 10
}
.disabled(score + 10 > max)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
}
}
}
}
struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
static var previews: some View {
ContentView()
}
}
This of course is the first revision, and it isn’t very reusable in the current state. So the next step was to make it more reusable.
import SwiftUI
struct AdvancedStepper: View {
var value: Binding<Int>
var min: Int
var max: Int
var template: String
var body: some View {
HStack {
Text(String(format: template, value.wrappedValue.formatted()))
Spacer()
Button("-10") {
value.wrappedValue = value.wrappedValue - 10
}
.disabled(value.wrappedValue - 10 < min)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
Button("-1") {
value.wrappedValue = value.wrappedValue - 1
}
.disabled(value.wrappedValue - 1 < min)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
Button("+1") {
value.wrappedValue = value.wrappedValue + 1
}
.disabled(value.wrappedValue + 1 > max)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
Button("+10") {
value.wrappedValue = value.wrappedValue + 10
}
.disabled(value.wrappedValue + 10 > max)
.buttonStyle(BorderlessButtonStyle())
.padding(.horizontal, 4)
}
}
}
struct ContentView: View {
@State var score: Int = 0
var body: some View {
Form {
Text("Expanded Stepper Example")
AdvancedStepper(value: $score, min: 0, max: 10, template: "Score: %@")
}
}
}
struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
static var previews: some View {
ContentView()
}
}
I think I’m happy enough with this one for now. Of course I could take this further and make the step amounts customizable by the usage location.
When building a page with a Linear Progress bar, I thought it should have been partially filled and it wasn’t filled at all. Turns out it expected value to be between 0-100 and I was assuming it would have been 0-1. Best to check the documentation over just guessing, but we all know developers hate reading the documentation. So best do some tests to see which range it expects.
Check that you are on the expected GIT Branch and GIT Commit!!
When you want to debug certain sections of code with in an environment without restarting Apache or NGINX, there’s a template I use for displaying print messages.
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
echo "<pre>".json_encode($VALUE, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT)."</pre>";
ini_set('display_errors', 0);When you use Measurement format function in Swift it will always format the temperature to the format of the locale of the device. This is not the experience I wanted in my application. I wanted to provide the user an option to chose which scale they wanted to use, so I had to override the format operation. I used the following function to make this happen.
func formatTemperature(_ temperature: Double, _ scale: UnitTemperature) -> String {
let source = Measurement(value:temperature, unit: UnitTemperature.celsius)
let converted = source.converted(to: scale)
return "\(String(format: "%.1f", converted.value))\(converted.unit.symbol)"
}
Some of the biggest things that bug me as a user of software is how they handle errors. Apple has been known for silently handling errors and not telling users that something went wrong, this is bad. Another example of bad user handling is how Git Kraken handles theirs, they have a toast in the lower left that disappears after a duration of time. Both of these are really frustrating to the user of the software.
The best way to handle errors is to provide clear and copy-able error messages for your user. You could provide this using an alert, clearly visible logs, or a (persistent until dismissed) toast message in the corner. How ever you do this, provide a way that the user can take the error to Google afterwards. I prefer the alert method so that I am forced to acknowledge that an error has occurred.
When you have a need to serve up files using http. You can do so with http-server do this with npx http-server.
Sometimes when you are using php you need to change some of the settings, this can be done by using the ini file.
Before you change anything in the ini file you should check the phpinfo. This can be done by creating a file containing <?php phpinfo(); ?> and then navigating to the path for that file in a browser.
Once you have confirmed where the php ini file is, make your changes. To apply these changes you will have to restart apache. The code to do this depends on which platform you are running. One of the common ones can be done by systemctl restart apache2. Hope this helps someone.