Follow along at https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/33.
This day covers the first part of Project 7: Whitehouse Petitions in Hacking with Swift.
You can find the entire project I made to follow along in this folder, but Day 33, in particular, focuses on several specific topics:
- Creating the basic UI:
UITabBarController - Parsing JSON using the
Codableprotocol
While it's a subclass of UIViewController, UITabBarController is meant to manage an array of view controllers that users can choose between by selecting them from a set of bottom bar buttons. Our project doesn't address it in this day, but I'm very interested in the best practices for managing the said list of view controllers — and integrating that pattern within the app's overarching navigation patterns.
In due time, though. In the mean time, we can use it to set the stage for our app's two views: a "most recent" petitions list and a "popular" petitions list. Apple offers a pre-defined set of icons for each UITabBarItem that just so happen to suit these purposes.
And I find it interesting that we would need to go out of our way to use our own icons. On one hand, it can seem pretentious, but on the other hand, I completely respect this. Consistent navigation patterns are a cornerstone of good UX, and UITabBarItems for the UITabBarController are a cornerstone of said navigation. If there's not a good reason to use a custom icon here, system defaults FTW 💪.
Being a relatively recent addition to Swift, Codeable (introduced in Swift 4.0) couldn't have come sooner. Being able to use a built-in, first-party, standardized protocol for encoding (serializing) and decoding (deserializing) JSON into and from Swift structs/classes is tremendously useful. I can see myself saying "use Codable for all the things" now 😛.
