Captain Danko’s JavaScript Lab — Code Smarter with Tutorials, Frameworks & Dev Insights

In the last few years, I have gotten pretty all right at developing for iOS, it’s a jump from being a web and BI developer for the 6+ years before that. Recently, I tried to see if I can think of an app concept, document it, start working on it and submit it to the app store for review in a day? Well…as I discovered, I cannot, it takes me close to 2 days or 3 working days to do so. This is my timesheet for that entire process, 5:00am: Think about the problem the app solves and write a blogpost 7:00am: Think of the app UI concept 9:30am: Start learning those unknown iOS API 1:00pm: After lunch start coding the app in question 9:00pm: After having a gym and dinner break, stop working on the nearly complete app. Next day 6:00am: Finish the app i.e. from nearly complete to complete 8:00am: Think of the app icon design concept 9:00am: Make the app icon 1:00pm: Do a final round of testing 2:00pm: Think of and write the app store description and keywords 4...

This would be the first post from the new company website and quite frankly this post was long overdue, I finally found the time to write about our new app i.e.  Your Memories – I was there . It came to be when I was working on ‘Feature 21’ for  My Day To-Do  i.e.  a by product of our work on that feature. Yes, Feature 21 uses Image processing and  Artificial Intelligence (AI)  and during development, I just had a thought “hhmm let’s take some of the code,  specialise it and spin it off (make it) into a single feature app”. In this post I will be talking about what the app was, the problem it solves and some of the use cases of where it can be applied to. Background to single feature apps Every time I am trying to evaluate a new feature to add to My Day To-Do, I am usually exploring a new iOS API and my typical process is that I create a new  Xcode  project and work with that new API by practicing it in a dummy app. I usually end up tak...

Recently, while building our new app I was there , we ran into some problems while trying to get the app working smoothly on older iOS hardware i.e. iPhone 5 . I narrowed down the problem to an image optimisation issue and proceeded to solve that doing what seemed pretty obvious to me. Anyway I have written about my method of solving the problem as well as given some sample code to help explain the solution. You can read the post on, UITableView with images & performance issues Also have a look at some s ample code on GitHub on how to create a UITableView where each row shows an image and how to optimise it to run on older iOS hardware If you find my blog posts useful and want to support me, you can  Checkout the new website and let us know you have any feedback? Buy the pro version of  My Day To-Do  - it's cheaper at this stage Download the  Lite (free) version  and unlock one of it's IAPs Or maybe give  I was there  a try Whichev...

Upto this point, I had only worked with the UIWebView in iOS, even though I had heard/read about the new WKWebView . I had only read good things about it but given the limited resources at my startup, working with WKWebView was a lower priority. A few weeks ago, the time was right for me to have a more in-depth look at the WKWebView and while learning more about it I realised something. I realised that while there are a ton of useful tutorials out there, almost none of them covered it with the depth or all the use cases that I was after. One example of missing information or a use case is, if we receive a json object from the webview, how do we parse it in Swift? In this post I will be talking about how to parse json data in Swift sent from web content hosted in a WKWebView of an iOS app. Background As seen from HTMLStarterAppWithSwift , my interest in the webview is not for showing content hosted in a website but more towards working with content hosted locally i.e. a nati...

In the last few months we added a third party app analytics solution i.e. Firebase to My Day To-Do  and soon we realised that Firebase may not work every time. Hence we tried to abstract the analytics (decouple/separate) solution from the rest of the app code i.e. the app code can log analytics data without knowing about what analytics solution is in use. In this post I will talk about our analytics solution and provide some code examples for an iOS app with Firebase analytics. The aim of the code is to provide an example of how to abstract the analytics part from the rest of the app. Hence without further a due let's get to it. Background In June 2017, we added a third-party analytics solution i.e.  Firebase analytics to My Day To-Do for tracking app usage i.e. we wanted to know what aspects of our product do people use the most. At this stage I am the only developer at My Day To-Do and it was the first time I had worked with an analytics solution. Anyway I added ...