Category Archives: Uncategorized

Simple deep linking in Swift

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Josh Smith

If you need to support deep links with a custom URL scheme in your iOS or tvOS app, check out my tidy little API to help convert URLs into deep link objects. It’s written in Swift 3. I published it on … Continue reading →

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Reflectable enums in Swift 3

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Josh Smith

Suppose you are working on a Swift program that needs a data model to represent a contact, such as a person from the user’s address book or a FaceBook friend. You might start off by modeling this as a Contact … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift, Uncategorized | Tagged | 10 Comments

Generate Equatable code in Swift

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Josh Smith

Here is my Swift 3 utility function for turning a live class/struct instance into Equatable protocol code for that type: https://github.com/ijoshsmith/equatable-code-generator Here’s to never writing that kind of code ever again!

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Function composition in Swift

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Josh Smith

The way that functional programming languages allow functions to be combined can help make code easier to read and understand. The technique is known as function composition. I show how to compose functions in Swift 3 using custom operators, including a … Continue reading →

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Stones on a beach

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Josh Smith

Suppose that you arrange stones into a spiral on a sandy beach. After meticulously arranging your stone spiral, the world seems hell-bent on destroying it. A dog steps on some of the stones, a big wave carries some of them … Continue reading →

Posted in Thoughts, Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Finding unused resource strings in an iOS app

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Josh Smith

If you work on an iOS or OS X app that uses Strings files to store localized display text, over time those files can accumulate entries that are no longer used. Perhaps a developer forgot to remove a resource string when refactoring … Continue reading →

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Creating Tic-tac-toe in Swift: Artificial intelligence

Posted on December 5, 2015 by Josh Smith

This blog post is the second update about my Tic-tac-toe game, being written in Swift. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ijoshsmith/swift-tic-tac-toe Over the past week I wrote an intelligent agent which implements the Tic-tac-toe strategy devised by Allen Newell and … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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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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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