Sean-Allen on blog.iankulin.com

Sean != Erica

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Swift was newer, there was a bunch of podcasts about it - in early episodes of Fireside Swift the existence of a Swift Podcast Network is often mentioned, but now it’s more of an established language there’s a bit less current content to listen to, and what there is, is less focused on learning Swift and more about what’s happening in the community.

Being firmly in the camp of needing to learn more about the language, I’ve listen to a number of older podcasts, or even current ones (such as Fireside) but their older episodes. It is sort of an odd experience traveling on several slightly out of sync timelines, but quite a joy to see what happens to predictions - like the occasion when Paul Hudson predicts that an “Xcode lite” on iPad is unlikely to be able to write apps until a more swift like framework for developing interfaces exists.

One of the podcasts I’m working through by every episode is Paul’s Swift Over Coffee. The first season he was paired up with Sean Allen, but I’ve just started the second season with Erica Sadun. When I first came across Sean it took me a while to warm to his enthusiastic voice, but what I loved about him was he was never reluctant to ask Paul to explain something - usually something I needed explained as well. The dynamic of an expert (and expert teacher) co-hosting with a relative newbie was a great combination for me.

Erica is a giant in the Swift community, and she has a deep understanding and an wide knowledge of Swift topics, so she’s going to be great. In the first episode she and Paul riffed on a heap of interesting topics with great enthusiasm and clear enjoyment, but I did miss Sean asking for explanations!

Swift Over Coffee

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of the iOS development podcasts in my current rotation is “Swift Over Coffee”, it’s blurb is:

Swift over Coffee is a podcast that helps you keep your Swift skills up to date the easy way, hosted by Paul Hudson and Erica Sadun. Each episode has news, our picks of the week, plus an open ballot where you can share your views on important topics.

And that is about how it goes. In Season One, it’s actually Paul and Sean Allen at the mic, they chat about news and topics related to Swift and iOS development, and each week there’s a Twitter question that people have chipped in on and the hosts go over these different views in some detail.

There’s only two seasons - in 2019 and 2020, but still there’s lots of good content for a beginning developer like me.

SF Symbols

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of times in the App Development seminar I went to, we used system symbols in the place of images, and in his tutorial on Swift UI Basics, Sean Allen spent a few minutes talking about where they come from and how to choose them.

First, here’s how they look in code - this is from the default Hello World app.

struct ContentView: View {
 var body: some View {
 VStack {
 Image(systemName: "globe")
 .imageScale(.large)
 .foregroundColor(.accentColor)
 Text("Hello world")
 }
 }
}

The systemName parameter signifies the image is this type, and "globe" is the name of the image. The code above draws a globe with some lat/long lines. So where does “globe” come from, and how can I find and choose them?

That’s where “SF Symbols” comes in. This is an app containing a collection of over 4000 (in version 4) symbols that work well with the default San Francisco font, that can be scaled and in many cases coloured. These symbols are a kind of standard that (increasingly) users will recognise - so this also supports good user interfaces.

It’s straightforward to search for symbols and to view them in the colour combinations you’re using in your app (if that particular symbol supports it).

Passing Data

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sean Allen has come to my notice a couple of times, once where he was mentioned as freelance contractor who is a great contributor to the community (I think perhaps that was on Swiftcoders Podcast), and I’ve also bumped into him as co-host (with Paul Hudson) of the early episodes of the “Swift over Coffee” podcast.

This video I watched last night is a compilation of the first few videos of Sean’s SwiftUI course, and it’s pretty great. In particular he does a great job of explaining how to start to refactor child views out and call them, and how all the stacks go together to make a pretty interface. What he does not do is vist/explain any of the Swift language fundamentals. If you don’t already know what a struc is, and the Swift flavour of them, it may be a challenging place to start.

In the last couple of tutorials he starts on the way the views are called, and how we can pass values into them. This is great marketing for me - it’s exactly where I’m up to in my journey - I’m perplexed about the structure of a SwiftUI app (where’s main?!) and the engine that’s watching when the UI needs updated and building the views. For example, I want to write a little hello world that just prints the time on the screen. I got this far:

struct ContentView: View {
 let today = Date.now
 var body: some View {
 Text(today, style:.time)
 }
}

But then a minute later when it needs changed what happens? In traditional programming there would be a loop in main where I could check the minutes have changed, and force the redraw of the label.

I feel this is the thing that’s going to be explained clearly in the next few videos of Sean’s course, which is cunningly behind the paywall. I’m very tempted, although my learning is already spread over two proper courses plus a shotgun blast of other reading, podcasts and self created programming tasks.

I did have one moment of confusion when Sean passes down an @State variable to a child view and said the variable in the child view needed to be made @Binding. One of the top comments points this out as being unneeded and Sean agrees.