DEV Community: Raksha

Useful Tips for writing testable code in iOS.

Raksha — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:06:09 +0000

Many developers don't like writing tests.

But once you start writing it, you may fall in love with writing tests. You might not want to implement any feature without writing tests once you learn how to write them effectively. And that’s the reality.

However, the leading cause is code, which is highly coupled and difficult to test. But like with anything in life, it’s all about practice, and eventually, you will love it.

Writing testable code is an important practice for any software developer. It ensures that your code is reliable, maintainable, and easy to improve.

In this post, I tried to share a few important Dos and Don’ts points for writing testable Swift code that we need to consider while writing the test.

By following these best practices, you can write code that is easy to test and maintain, and that delivers the desired results.

Few points to get started...

Use dependency injection
Use appropriate app architecture
Avoid using singletons
Write tests for every feature
Use the mocking library

For a detailed post, check out canopas blog.

Cool tooltips designed using only CSS

Raksha — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 12:20:32 +0000

Beautify your tooltips with customized arrows.

Do you know how to design tooltips using only CSS?

In the UI design, we often need to show limited information using images or icons. On hovering over it, we can show more information using tooltips.

This article will guide you to design different types of tooltip arrows using pure CSS. We will draw arrows on pseudo-selectors like :before and :after with the absolute position using only CSS.

We will draw below shapes for the tooltips.

Triangle
Right triangle
Curved
V-curved
Circled

For implementation details, check out our Blog.

How to improve performance of your SwiftUI iOS app?

Raksha — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 14:34:30 +0000

SwiftUI is a powerful new framework for building user interfaces on Apple platforms.

It’s a declarative framework, which means you can define the desired state of your user interface and the framework takes care of updating the views to match the state.

This can make it easier to write and maintain your code, but it also means that you need to be mindful of how you use the framework to avoid performance issues.

SwiftUI has been around for almost 3 years now, and during this period, I have noticed a few things that can impact its performance, the mistakes every developer should avoid.

In this post, I’ve tried to cover a few important tips that we can take care of for SwiftUI app performance.

Use structs instead of classes for your data model
SwiftUI works best with value types (such as structs) because they are easier to work with and can result in better performance. When possible, try to use structs instead of classes to store your data and pass it around your app.

This can be more efficient than using classes, which are reference types and require more memory management.

Use lazy stacks and grids when appropriate
Lazy stacks and grids are efficient ways to display large lists of views, as they only create the views that are currently visible on the screen.

This can help improve the performance of your app, especially when displaying large lists of views that are expensive to create.

Check out our blog for more tips and tricks to boost the performance of your SwiftUI iOS app.

How to deploy a website using serverless architecture?

Raksha — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:56:33 +0000

How to deploy a website with AWS S3 + CloudFront using CloudFormation?

After making the backend serverless, it’s time for the frontend to go serverless.

So, why do we go serverless or say what are the benefits?

Get rid of server management and code deployment stuff
Pay for what you use
Infinite scaling

This article will show you how to deploy a website using AWS S3, CloudFront, and CloudFormation.

Add IAM permissions
Create an S3 bucket and upload the code
Create OriginAccessControl(OAC)
Configure CloudFront
Update the S3 bucket policy
Point the domain to CloudFront
FAQs

For detailed implementation, check out our blog.

CSS pseudo-classes with examples

Raksha — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 11:55:00 +0000

Do you know how to apply CSS based on some conditions?

Did you know HTML elements can adopt CSS based on conditions?

The answer is YES. Using CSS pseudo-classes.

CSS pseudo-class functions free us from the nested CSS rules. As a result, styles are precise and easy to understand.

It takes a selector list as an argument and selects any element that can be selected by one of the selectors in that list.

Imagine you want to apply styles based on a few conditions. But you don’t want to integrate javascript or jquery into your webpage. That's where you can use CSS pseudo-classes.

In this post, you will learn 6 CSS classes.

:where()
:has()
:is()
:not()
:dir()
:lang()

It’s always possible to design pages without advanced selectors. But if you want to make styles pretty and precise, it might be proved a savior!

For a detailed implementation guide, check out canopas blog.

Resize TextField in Jetpack Compose

Raksha — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 12:27:37 +0000

Do you know how to make TextField responsive to fit content perfectly?

Let’s make TextField Responsive to fit perfectly within its bounds.

I was working on the app where I needed a few TextField that should resize as the text grows. Currently, there’s no way to accomplish this in Jetpack compose. So let’s implement a custom resizable text field.

We’ll implement the TextField that resizes depending on the fixed height.

The complete source code of the implementation is available on GitHub.

I've divided the implementation into smaller parts to make it easy.

Calculate the line count and height of the Text with the given Text Style
Shrink the font size to fit on the specified max line

For detailed implementation, check out our blog.

SwiftUI animations with examples

Raksha — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:01:01 +0000

Why do users love motion(animation) so much?

Because animation supports the essence of actual and real interaction.

Here are some of the cool and eye-pleasing animations developed using SwiftUI.

This post consists of 3 animations:

Rotating Dot Animation — Dot rotates in the circle and works as a loader
Three Bouncing Dot animation — 3 dots that bounce in the flow one-by-one
Clock Animation — Self-explanatory right?

The final implementation will look like this:

If you're not interested in the process and want to use them directly in your project, check out the source code on our GitHub.

For implementation detail, visit canopas blog.

How to Use Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database with Combine in iOS

Raksha — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 10:47:55 +0000

In this post, you will learn how to observe items from the Firebase databases in real-time using combine framework.

The database is at the heart of every application, be it Android, iOS, or the Web. When it comes to iOS databases, there are so many popular options like Coredata, SQLite, and Realm.

They all have a common disadvantage though, they are local databases and thus it’s not sufficient if we want our users to interact with each other or want to store data in the cloud.

If we want to save data in the cloud, we will need a backend, which mostly comes at a huge cost.

That’s where the Firebase database comes into the picture. I’m not going to list out all the benefits of it as it’s a well-known database in the community but you can check out official docs for more information.

Today, we will explore how we can observe items from the database in real-time using combine framework.

Initially, we will understand an example but later we will create an extension that can convert any database reference to a combine stream.

For detailed implementation, please check out canopas blog.

Reorder items with Drag and Drop using SwiftUI

Raksha — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 12:28:26 +0000

Learn how to replicate UIKit’s Drag and Drop feature in the SwiftUI

Earlier, we implemented a Drag and Drop feature for UICollectionView, which was used to copy the dragged item. Very useful for functionality like adding items to the cart.

Please check out the article if you’ve missed it.

Last week, we received a new requirement to provide drag and drop feature in the app for a better user experience.

According to requirements, we wanted to allow users to prioritize their activity according to their needs. While we did the implementation with UIKit in the past, we never had a chance to do it using SwiftUI.

I have divided this into 3 parts, feel free to jump around according to your needs!

Create a basic UI
Add drag support
Add drop support and update the list

For detailed implementation, check out our blog.

How to draw text on Canvas using drawText API in Jetpack Compose?

Raksha — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 09:16:44 +0000

Exploring text on Canvas using drawText API in Jetpack Compose.

Before Compose 1.3.0, there was no drawText(). We couldn’t draw text directly on the Jetpack Compose canvas, we had to use android native canvas canvas.nativeCanvas.drawText to draw text.

The recent release of Jetpack Compose 1.3.0 introduces many new APIs. And Text on Canvas is one of them.

Please note that this API is still in the experimental state and it is likely to change in the future.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the new DrawScope.drawText() API with multiple examples.

For those who are interested in code only, here you go.

The original post is published on the Canopas blog.

What is moment.js alternative in Javascript?

Raksha — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 09:19:34 +0000

Most web developers have used moment.js. Do you know what's the alternative?

Are you looking for a Moment.js alternative in Javascript?

In one of our laravel projects, after upgrading dependencies, the docker build suddenly started throwing an error of moment.js.

On debugging, I noticed that moment.js was now in maintenance mode and they recommends using different libraries as an alternative.

As our requirements for date and time are not much complex, we decided to use javascript’s default Date() object and comes up with this article.

We've gathered a few alternatives that you can use in your projects.

Here's what you'll learn?

Get the year, month, date, day, and time
First and Last day of the month
Add and Subtract day, month, year, time
Get and Set the timezone for the date
Get dates in various formats

For implementation detail, check out our blog.

Learn How to use Google Sheets in GoLang?

Raksha — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:50:56 +0000

Do you know how to perform crud operations in Google sheets from the backend?

Google is providing APIs to use Google spreadsheets in your project.

We can easily access those services and add or update the same using APIs.

Today, you will learn...

How to authenticate and create a google sheet
Append data to google sheet
Update cells of the google sheet
Append data with a background color to google sheet

We will use the google SDK library implemented in Golang.

Explore google’s spreadsheet API reference in depth for a detailed explanation.

Here's the video tutorial if you prefer watching over reading.

For detailed implementation, check out the original post.

DEV Community: Raksha

Useful Tips for writing testable code in iOS.

Cool tooltips designed using only CSS

We will draw below shapes for the tooltips.

How to improve performance of your SwiftUI iOS app?

How to deploy a website using serverless architecture?

Table of contents

CSS pseudo-classes with examples

Resize TextField in Jetpack Compose

SwiftUI animations with examples

How to Use Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database with Combine in iOS

Reorder items with Drag and Drop using SwiftUI

How to draw text on Canvas using drawText API in Jetpack Compose?

What is moment.js alternative in Javascript?

Learn How to use Google Sheets in GoLang?