An introduction to UI Testing on iOS

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I’ve always been a big fan of UI testing where appropriate, we can use it to automate the validation of visual components in our applications which allows us to reduce bugs, regressions and confusing behaviour within our applications — all helping us to save time from manually checking the behaviour and display of our view components. In this article we’re going to take a brief look at the XCTest framework which allows us to create a collection of tests for our iOS projects — this time around we’re going to focus on User Interface tests. At this point I’m going to presume that you…

Exploring Firebase Authentication on iOS

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Firebase provides an extensive suite of tools that helps us to both make app development simpler and also provide us with some powerful features to analyse and improve the experience for our users. Within this suite we will find Firebase Authentication, which is a tool providing our users with the ability to sign-up and sign-in to our applications using email, Facebook, Twitter, Github and more. In this article I want to dive into how we can get this functionality setup and added into our apps. To begin setting up our project with Firebase we need to setup our project within…

Exploring Firebase on Android & iOS: Remote Config

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Remote config is a feature of Firebase suite that allows us to alter both the look and feel of our application without the need to publish any updates to the Google Play or App store. This works by allowing us to define in-app parameters that can be overridden from within the firebase console — these parameters can then be activated for either all or a defined selection of users. This powerful feature gives us a range of new abilities when it comes to immediate updates, temporary changes or testing new features amongst users. Let’s take a dive and learn the what, why…

Exploring Firebase on Android & iOS: Analytics

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Firebase is an exciting new collection of services that I’ve been reading up on and experimenting with. In this new series of articles, we’ll be covering the features of firebase to learn exactly what we can do with each integration. In this chapter, we’re going to be taking a look at Firebase Analytics — the integration that allows us to begin tracking user and application data in just a few steps. Analytics are crucial to learning more about both your application and your users. Tracking events allows you to learn things such as what works in your app, what users may not…

Exploring Google Eddystone with the Proximity Beacon API

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Google recently announced the release of their cross-platform BLE Beacon format. Here we look at what we can do with it and how to use this new API to manage our beacons. We recently saw the announcement of Google’s open beacon format, known as Eddystone. Released alongside this was the Proximity Beacon API, used to register and manage these beacons. Pairing this with the soon-to-be-released Nearby API – used by applications to interact with beacons – brings numerous possibilities for location experiences. I’ve had the chance to explore this API and its documentation. In this post I hope to give an…