Day 41

About 7 min

Day 41 관련

There is some pseudo-science that claims the second or third Monday in January is “blue Monday” – the most depressing day of the year. The reasons given include weather conditions in the northern hemisphere being bleak, the amount of time since the Christmas holiday, the number of people giving up on New Year’s resolutions, and more.

It is, of course, nonsense, but it does have one grain of truth: it’s easy to get discouraged when you’re part-way through something, because the initial novelty has worn off and there’s still a lot more work ahead of you.

That’s where you are today. You’re less than half the way through the 100 Days of Swift, but you’re already being asked to tackle complicated topics in multiple consecutive days – the difficulty level is ramping up, the pace probably feels a little quicker, and the amount of code you’re being asked to write is also going up.

I know some of the days you’ve faced have been harder than others, and I also know you’re probably feeling tired – you’re giving up a lot of time to make this happen. But I want to encourage you to keep pushing on: you’re almost at the half-way point now, and the apps you’re now able to build are genuinely useful – you’ve come a long way!

Helpfully, today is another consolidation day, which is partly a chance for us to go over some topics again to make sure you really understand them, partly a chance for me to dive into specific topics such as enumerated() and GCD’s background/foreground bounce, and partly a chance for you to try making your own app from scratch.

As always, the challenge you’ll face is absolutely within your current skill level, and it gives you a chance to see how far you’ve come for yourself. Ricky Mondello – one of the team who builds Safari at Apple – once said, “one of my favorite things about software engineering, or any kind of growth really, is coming back to something that you previously thought was too hard and knowing that you can do it.”

Today you have three topics to work through, one of which of is your challenge.

What you learned

100 Days of Swift - Day 41 - What you learned

What you learned

Projects 7, 8, and 9 were the first in the series I consider to be “hard”: you had to parse JSON data, you had to create a complex layout for 7 Swifty Words, and you took your first steps towards creating multithreaded code – code that has iOS do more than one thing at a time.

None of those things were easy, but I hope you felt the results were worth the effort. And, as always, don’t worry if you’re not 100% on them just – we’ll be using Codable and GCD more in future projects, so you’ll have ample chance to practice.

You’ve now met UITabBarController, which is another core iOS component – you see it in the App Store, Music, iBooks, Health, Activity, and more.
Each item on the tab bar is represented by a UITabBarItem that has a title and icon. If you want to use one of Apple’s icons, it means using Apple’s titles too.
We used Data to load a URL, with its contentsOf method. That then got fed to JSONDecoder so that we could read it in code.
We used WKWebView again, this time to show the petition content in the app. This time, though, we wanted to load our own HTML rather than a web site, so we used the loadHTMLString() method.
Rather than connect lots of actions in Interface Builder, you saw how you could write user interfaces in code. This was particularly helpful for the letter buttons of 7 Swifty Words, because we could use a nested loop.
In project 8 we used property observers, using didSet. This meant that whenever the score property changed, we automatically updated the scoreLabel to reflect the new score.
You learned how to execute code on the main thread and on background threads using DispatchQueue, and also met the performSelector(inBackground:) method, which is the easiest way to run one whole method on a background thread.
Finally, you learned several new methods, not least enumerated() for looping through arrays, joined() for bringing an array into a single value, and replacingOccurrences() to change text inside a string.

Key points

100 Days of Swift - Day 41 - Key points

Key points

There are three Swift features that are so important – and so commonly used – that they are worth revising to make sure you’re comfortable with them.

The first piece of code I’d like to look at is this one:

for (index, line) in lines.enumerated() {
    let parts = line.components(separatedBy: ": ")

This might seem like a new way of writing a loop, but really it’s just a variation of the basic for loop. A regular for loop returns one value at a time from an array for you to work with, but this time we’re calling the enumerated() method on the array, which causes it to return two things for each item in the array: the item’s position in the array, as well as the item itself.

It’s common to see enumerated() in a loop, because its behavior of delivering both the item and its position is so useful. For example, we could use it to print out the results of a race like this:

let results = ["Paul", "Sophie", "Lottie", "Andrew", "John"]

for (place, result) in results.enumeradidSet. This meant that whenever the scorted() {
    print("\(place + 1). \(result)")
}

Note that I used \(place + 1) to print out each person’s place in the results, because array positions all count from 0.

The second piece of code we’re going to review is this:

var score: Int = 0 {
    didSet {
        scoreLabel.text = "Score: \(score)"
    }
}

This is a property observer, and it means that whenever the score integer changes the label will be updated to match. There are other ways you could ensure the two remain in sync: we could have written a setScore() method, for example, or we could just have updated the scoreLabel text by hand whenever the score property changed.

The former isn’t a bad idea, but you do need to police yourself to ensure you never set score directly - and that’s harder than you think! The second is a bad idea, however: duplicating code can be problematic, because if you need to change something later you need to remember to update it everywhere it’s been duplicated.

The final piece of code I’d like to look at again is this:

DispatchQueue.global().async { [weak self] in
    // do background work

    DispatchQueue.main.async {
        // do main thread work
    }
}

That code uses Grand Central Dispatch to perform some work in the background, then perform some more work on the main thread. This is extremely common, and you’ll see this same code appear in many projects as your skills advance.

The first part of the code tells GCD to do the following work on a background thread. This is useful for any work that will take more than a few milliseconds to execute, so that’s anything to do with the internet, for example, but also any time you want to do complex operations such as querying a database or loading files.

The second part of the code runs after your background work has completed, and pushes the remaining work back to the main thread. This is where you present the user with the results of your work: the database results that matched their search, the remote file you fetched, and so on.

It is extremely important that you only ever update your user interface from the main thread – trying to do it from a background thread will cause your app to crash in the best case, or – much worse – cause weird inconsistencies in your app.

Challenge

100 Days of Swift - Day 41 - Challenge

Challenge

This is the first challenge that involves you creating a game. You’ll still be using UIKit, though, so it’s a good chance to practice your app skills too.

The challenge is this: make a hangman game using UIKit. As a reminder, this means choosing a random word from a list of possibilities, but presenting it to the user as a series of underscores. So, if your word was “RHYTHM” the user would see “??????”.

The user can then guess letters one at a time: if they guess a letter that it’s in the word, e.g. H, it gets revealed to make “?H??H?”; if they guess an incorrect letter, they inch closer to death. If they seven incorrect answers they lose, but if they manage to spell the full word before that they win.

That’s the game: can you make it? Don’t underestimate this one: it’s called a challenge for a reason – it’s supposed to stretch you!

The main complexity you’ll come across is that Swift has a special data type for individual letters, called Character. It’s easy to create strings from characters and vice versa, but you do need to know how it’s done.

First, the individual letters of a string are accessible simply by treating the string like an array – it’s a bit like an array of Character objects that you can loop over, or read its count property, just like regular arrays.

When you write for letter in word, the letter constant will be of type Character, so if your usedLetters array contains strings you will need to convert that letter into a string, like this:

let strLetter = String(letter)

Note: unlike regular arrays, you can’t read letters in strings just by using their integer positions – they store each letter in a complicated way that prohibits this behavior.

Once you have the string form of each letter, you can use contains() to check whether it’s inside your usedLetters array.

That’s enough for you to get going on this challenge by yourself. As per usual there are some hints below, but it’s always a good idea to try it yourself before reading them.

You already know how to load a list of words from disk and choose one, because that’s exactly what we did in tutorial 5.
You know how to prompt the user for text input, again because it was in tutorial 5. Obviously this time you should only accept single letters rather than whole words – use someString.count for that.
You can display the user’s current word and score using the title property of your view controller.
You should create a usedLetters array as well as a wrongAnswers integer.
When the player wins or loses, use UIAlertController to show an alert with a message.

Still stuck? Here’s some example code you might find useful:

let word = "RHYTHM"
var usedLetters = ["R", "T"]
var promptWord = ""

for letter in word.characters {
    let strLetter = String(letter)

    if usedLetters.contains(strLetter) {
        promptWord += strLetter
    } else {
        promptWord += "?"
    }
}

print(promptWord)

Note

Don’t worry if you don’t complete challenges in the day they were assigned – in future days you’ll find you have some time to spare here and there, so challenges are something you can return back to in the future.

Day 41

Day 41 관련

Milestone: Projects 7-9

What you learned

Key points

Challenge