The (not so) Weekly Fitz

How to export one of those pesky weird PDF forms as a regular PDF

Failing to open a PDF form using Preview? Want to export a PDF form to a regular PDF (on macOS)? Here's the solution you weren't looking for.

iOS Development

Make your UIButtons come to life

After giving our UIViews' both shadows AND rounded corners, today we will learn how to animate UIButtons and make them visually respond to our users' touch!

Thoughts

Covid vaccines reticence is a trust issue

I have a piece on how most things we try to accomplish in life often come down to people buy-in that has been sitting as a draft for over a year. I still hope to actually finish and publish it here some day in the near future, but answering to

Programming

No space left on your Cloud9 environment? Here's how to solve that

While using Cloud9, and installing node dependencies, my instance ran out of space. I couldn't finish setting up my project, and the terminal's autocompletion was dead in the water.

RxSwift

Getting the last two values from an RxSwift Observable

I really can't remember why, but at some point I needed to get a RxSwift Observable's last two values, to compare them and decide what to do next.

Thoughts

A world of waste

Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?

Swift Programming

Solve most of your Xcode problems through Cargo Cult

If you are an iOS or macOS developper, you probably work with Xcode. And if you work with Xcode, you've most probably had some weird times where, suddenly, things just stopped working. Here's how to solve that

Serverless

Separate concerns and optimize client performances with CQRS using Firestore & Firebase Cloud Functions

Optimize your mobile app's performances and run "big" and "complex" queries in NoSQL, using CQRS & Serverless! (in our case, Firestore & Firebase Cloud Functions)

SwiftUI

Add a bottom divider to your SwiftUI view!

Where we learn to look around thoroughly before blindly trusting strangers.

Swift Programming

Give your UIViews and UIButtons some rounded edges and a shadow!

Somehow, making a button rounded, and then adding a shadow to it, seems to be more difficult than it should. Here's how to do it in Swift!

Thoughts

Life Over The Air

Ever heard of the School of the Air? It's an Australian thing, from deep within the Australian outback. A peculiar and quite unusual one at that, until recently.

Firebase

Make your Firebase Storage files available on upload

Ever uploaded a file to Firebase Storage, only to be hit with a 403 error when trying to access it? Here's how to get a publicly accessible URL for the file you just uploaded.

Swift Programming

Memoize your API calls in Swift using functions' scopes!

Improve your iOS app's performance and battery usage by not repeating expensive computation and network calls, using memoization, in Swift!

Swift Programming

Stop hard coding your cells identifiers

Tired of having your app crash on runtime because of a misspelled a tableView's or collectionView's cell identifier? Learn here how to stop that from happening, today!

node.js

What do to when your Node.js code crashes because of a circular JSON

You're trying to figure out what some object looks like, and since you're not running your code locally you don't have access to a proper debugger. So you print it. And your whole Node.js app crashes. What do you do?

node.js

Scrap an Instagram’s post’s author; a gentle introduction to web scraping in Node.js

Want a 'soft' introduction to web scraping? Need to get some data from an Instagram post? Here's how to get it done, in Node.js, using cheerio!

Swift Programming

Swiftly deal with pagination in Swift

Not satisfied with how you're handling pagination in your Swift iOS app? Pretty sure there has to be a better way to paginate your UICollectionView or UITableView? So did I, and here's how I did it!

node.js

Localize your push notifications in Node.js

Being a backend developer, there's an unusual thing with push notifications. Devices display what we send. The clients don't have a say in it; they can't remodel and transform them. Meaning, we basically have to do some UI (User Interface), and localize it.

Typescript

Upload a remote file to Firebase Storage (in Node.js)

Struggling to upload remote files to Firebase Storage? Running on Node.js? You're in luck!

iOS Development

Always handle your table & collection view cell selection properly, using functions

When writing iOS, you will always end up using UITableView or UICollectionView. With them come cells, delegates, datasources, cellForRow(at indexPath:), didSelect,... I've often seen it become (and inherited) an ugly mess. Not anymore.

macOS

Preventing distractions on macOS

If you're like me, notifications, alerts and boucing things when working is at least annoying, and down right distracting when you're having a hard time focusing. Like I am right now, which is why I'm writing this post instead of actually working on my side project.

Serverless

Add an Apple App Site Association (AASA) to your Wix, Squarespace or whatever website, using Cloudflare Workers

I currently work at Spotr, a company building a mobile app. We rely on Wix for the landing page, for the simple reason that it's simple enough to use for the rest of team to update it and design it themselves, letting me focus on back-end and engineering tasks in

iOS Development

How to debug your JSON in Xcode when JSONDecoder fails

Sometimes, JSONDecoder fails. And when that happens, it can be difficult to figure out what went wrong. Not if you can print Data instances!

iOS Development

How to elegantly make sure you only setup your ViewController's UI on viewDidLoad

When handling navigation, we often end up having to pass some sort of state to our view controllers, wether directly or indirectly. Setting endless optional publicly exposed properties feels dirty and is a pain, while setting @IBOutlets before viewDidLoad is crash prone. Let's solve that together.

Serverless

Dynamize (aka variablize) your AWS deployment account using the Serverless framework

Last time we dynamized your serverless resources based on your deployment stage. Now we'll dynamize your AWS deployment account! Yes, that's right, automation all the way!