Switching Gears
You may not be surprised when I say that I’m taking a break from learning Reactive Cocoa. Several of my coworkers are diving into swift, and with the imminent release of Reactive Cocoa 3.0, I decided to switch gears.
Asynchronously Loading Images
One of my first endevours into the realm of expanding my RACObserve-fu was to asynchronously load a UIImage from an image URL that was returned from the movie API in order to populate thumbnails in table view cells. Historically, using AFNetworking’s built-in mechanism or a third party caching library such as SDWebImage would work perfectly fine, but I wanted to stick to my guns and fully gulp the Reactive Cocoa punch that I’ve so graciously poured.
Baby’s First Monad
Since this is an app designed to pull down recent showtime listings from the Internet¹, I realized I’d need a network request in order to fetch the data and populate a listing of showtimes. In this case, a simple array to populate a tableview with the movies that are playing for each theater. I didn’t want to waste time building the entire API before digging into the app, so I spun up a dummy heroku instance to return some hard coded values. At this point, my muscle memory is nearly wired to pull in something like AFNetworking and start making GET requests. Before I knew it, I had a podfile and a view model ready to go; but quickly realized that I’m supposed to be doing this the Reactive Cocoa way.
RAC Diary
In the vain of Brent Simmons’ Vesper Sync Diary¹, my plan is to express my thoughts about learning Reactive Cocoa as I build an app from scratch using the framework. The app will be an iPhone targeted app that will serve as a feed to show current movie theater showtimes of a local movie theater from my home town. I’m using this as an opportunity to get my feet wet with reactive cocoa and to see what all the fuss is about.
2015 Goals
As the new year approaches, I’ve began to think of some goals of mine. Rather than make goals, I’ve always tried to improve on an as-needed basis; why wait till the beginning of the new year? It’s close enough to the new year this time that I am willing to make an exception and wait a few days. Here are 3 goals of mine that I wish to accomplish over the following 12 months.