Published in Zendesk Engineering·Oct 26, 2021Member-onlyiOS How-to — Capture Touch Events Outside UIView BoundsWhen working with touch events in iOS, UIKit provides most of what we need. In the case of UIButton, we register the action we want to take when a user taps a button. When a user taps anywhere on the screen, and that tap is inside the frame of our…IOS6 min readIOS6 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Aug 31, 2021Member-onlySwift Concurrency: An IntroductionThe Swift concurrency roadmap was first outlined in a post to the Swift forums in October 2020, with its stated goal being to “make concurrent programming in Swift convenient, efficient, and safe”. In this article, we take a look at why a new concurrency model is being introduced to Swift…Swift9 min readSwift9 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Jul 5, 2021Member-onlyUI Testing iOS Apps with the Robot PatternIn his book Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn defined the concept of a test pyramid. Mike presented a visual metaphor depicting a pyramid of layers, where each layer in the pyramid represented a different type of software test. …IOS12 min readIOS12 min read
Jan 30, 2021Member-onlyCovid-19: How My Coronavirus Symptoms ProgressedI just felt…different. Something was off, but I couldn’t say what exactly. I even told my wife that day that I just felt…weird. I didn’t feel sick exactly, more like I was not myself. …Covid 193 min readCovid 193 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Sep 22, 2020Member-onlyApp Onboarding with SwiftUIOnboarding is the process of helping users to understand an app, and hopefully, encouraging them to continue to use it. Onboarding flows usually consist of one or more screens explaining how a user can use the app, and often involve some input from the user, e.g …5 min read5 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Jul 15, 2020Member-onlySwiftUI & UIView — A Simple Mistake“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” I recently made a simple mistake. An implementation which appeared correct, based on its initial usage, turned out to be incorrect when its usage changed. But before we start, although this post describes the mistake I made and shows you how…Swiftui5 min readSwiftui5 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Jun 4, 2020Member-onlyA Github Actions Workflow to Generate & Publish your Hugo WebsiteThis short post describes a Github Actions workflow to generate your Hugo-based website and publish it to Github Pages. To learn more about Hugo and GitHub Pages, and how to use them to build your website, see my previous post. What is Github Actions Github Actions is a service from Github which allows you…2 min read2 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Sep 5, 2018Xcode 10’s build system and Code Generation (R.swift)Xcode 10 includes a new build system, enabled by default, which improves build performance. This is a very welcome improvement. R.swift is an open source library which makes it both easier and type-safe to use resources such as images, fonts, and segues. …Swift2 min readSwift2 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Jun 18, 2018iOS How-to — Add Adaptive constraints to support a Universal AppXcode’s interface builder allows us to configure layouts which will automatically change shape and size based on a range of environment variables, such as: Device screen size (e.g iPhone or iPad) Device Orientation (portrait or landscape) Adaptation (multi-tasking on iPad) In this post, we will learn how to add NSLayoutConstraints…IOS7 min readIOS7 min read
Published in Zendesk Engineering·Apr 10, 2018Xcode Quick Tip – Testing your layout for localizationThe Zendesk Support app supports a number of languages, meaning that the strings we display in the app change, depending on the device language set. Recently we encountered buggy UI component positioning when the device language was changed from the default language (English). This is shown below with Dutch. Due…IOS2 min readIOS2 min read
