Michael Brown

I came across a crash in my app Memories when using the iOS 11 betas. It happened reliably every time I loaded a video, and the video code uses KVO, as AVFoundation requires you to use it for a lot of things. When I ran the app in Xcode this was the exception that was causing the crash: Simultaneous accesses to 0x1c41ded68, but modification requires exclusive access. Previous access (a modification) started at addObserver(_:forKeyPath:options:context:) Current access (a modification) started at observeValue(forKeyPath:of:change:context:) The hex address was the address of the property I was using as the context passed to addObserver() and which I was checking in observeValue. »

So, I was working on updating my app Memories to support displaying Live Photos properly and not just as a static image. I took a look at the documentation for PHLivePhotoView and thought that this would be fairly straightforward. For Live Photos, I’ll just use a PHLivePhotoView instead of a UIImageView. Well, as is usually the case when a developer says: “this looks straightforward, I’ll have it done in a couple of hours”, it was not quite so straightforward and had me scratching my head and cursing until 2am until I finally realised what I was doing wrong. »

I’m an iOS developer in my spare time. You know, on evenings, and weekends. I recently launched an app called Memories. I created the app mainly because it was an app that I wanted to have. I thought that if I wanted to use an app like this (and I use it every day), then maybe other people would like an app like that too. The app replicates a feature found in cloud photo services like Everpix (RIP) and Picturelife that shows you all the photos you took on a certain date (usually today) in previous years. »

Comparing dates is one of the most common things you have to do as a developer of almost any type of software. At first glance it would seem to be something almost trivially easy. What could possibly go wrong? Well, turns out, quite a lot! I’m going to highlight just one issue that recently caused an embarassing bug in my app Memories. It involved just a simple date comparison, ignoring time, and without crossing timezones. »

With the release of Swift 2.2 in Xcode 7.3 C-style for loops have become deprecated. The default Xcode fix-it for converting them uses a Range: let count = 5 for var index = 0; index < count; index++ { doSomething(index) } is converted do: let count = 5 for index in 0 ..< count { doSomething(index) } For the vast majority of C-style for loops this will work perfectly well. »