Season's Greetings, NSHipsters!
As the year winds down, and we take a moment to reflect on our experiences over the past months, one thing is clear: 2014 has been an incredible year professionally for Apple developers. So much has happened in such a short timespan, and yet it's hard to remember our relationship to Objective-C before Swift, or what APIs could have captivated our imagination as much as iOS 8 or WatchKit.
It's an NSHipster tradition to ask you, dear readers, to send in your favorite tips and tricks from the past year for publication over the New Year's holiday. This year, with the deluge of new developments—both from Cupertino and the community at large—there should be no shortage of interesting tidbits to share.
Submit your favorite piece of Swift or Objective-C trivia, framework arcana, hidden Xcode feature, or anything else you think is cool, and you could have it featured in the year-end blowout article. Just comment on this gist below!
If you're wondering about what to post, look to past year's write-ups for inspiration (2014, 2013).
I can't wait to see what you all send in!
Optionals should be avoided. Implicitly unwrapped optionals should be strongly avoided. Want to declare a var but don't necessarily have an initial value at init time? Use the lazy keyword, and just don't call the getter before you have your real value.
lazy var someModelStructure = ExpensiveClass()
if you call set on this var without having ever called the getter, the lazy expression is never evaluated. Great for references to views that you don't necessarily want to init until viewDidLoad, for instance.