Author Archives: Josh Smith

Creating Tic-tac-toe in Swift

Posted on November 27, 2015 by Josh Smith

Normally I blog about a program I’ve already written. I decided this time to take a different approach, and blog about a Tic-tac-toe program that I’m writing instead. This will give people who are interested in watching a Swift program evolve over … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift, Tic-tac-toe | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Compressing a Swift array

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Josh Smith

Suppose you have an array of values in your Swift app and you need to compress it to a smaller size, with the intention of making it occupy less memory. If the array contains many consecutive repeated values it could be … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged | 1 Comment

I’m back

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Josh Smith

This blog’s half year of inactivity is over. I had joined Apple as a software engineer, to work on a low-level communications component that runs on all iOS and OS X devices. As an Apple employee I was prohibited from blogging, hence … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Creating ASCII art in functional Swift

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Josh Smith

This article explores an iOS app, written in a functional Swift style, that converts an image to ASCII art. For example, when given the famous Lenna photograph… …it creates a string that, when printed, looks something like this… Zooming into … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Zipping two lists in Haskell

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Josh Smith

Studying a pure functional programming, such as Haskell, can be an eye-opening experience. The standard library in Haskell provides a zip function, which combines the elements of two lists into a single list of tuples. I decided to implement my own version, named zip … Continue reading →

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Caesar cipher in Swift

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Josh Smith

I posted a Swift project to GitHub that implements the Caesar cipher, which was the encryption technique used to protect Julius Caesar’s personal correspondence. It’s a straightforward algorithm that maps each letter in the alphabet to another letter. The code also … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Functional parallel programming in Elixir

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Josh Smith

This article reviews a program that implements a parallelized algorithm, using a functional programming style made possible by a fantastic new language named Elixir. Along the way I very briefly introduce Elixir, review the relevance of functional programming in modern … Continue reading →

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Getting into functional programming with Swift

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Josh Smith

This article examines two implementations of a logic puzzle written in Swift. The first example uses an imperative programming style, which is the style familiar to most iOS developers. Then we see the same small program written in a functional style, which is … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 12 Comments

Maximizing the Preview Assistant Editor in Xcode 6

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Josh Smith

While working through a coding tutorial in the excellent iOS 8 by Tutorials book by the Ray Wenderlich crew, I learned about the new Preview Assistant Editor in Xcode 6. This is a feature that you can enable in an assistant editor while editing a view file … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS8 | Tagged , | 3 Comments

A Swift App that Calls JSON Web Services

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Josh Smith

In this article I introduce a small iOS 8 app written in Swift, named SwiftPlaces. I wrote the app in order to get more experience with the language and try out some new features in iOS 8, such as Adaptive Layout. … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS8, Swift | 8 Comments