If you’re looking for a quicker way to iterate while you’re building SwiftUI views, and you don’t have macOS Catalina installed, you might enjoy the Playground experience more than you enjoy pressing command + R every time you make a change and want to see it in the user interface. How do you do it?...

First Things First In order to use NSPersistentCloudKitContainer in your app, you need to be targeting iOS 13+. The CloudKit syncing portion only works on physical devices (not in the simulator). That being the case, you’ll need two or more devices running the app and using the same iCloud account t...

A new SceneDelegate was introduced for Storyboard-based apps in iOS 13, and with it came some changes in how you’re able to access your app’s root view controller at app launch. The Old Way AppDelegate Swift file used to be where code landed for accessing your app’s rootViewController: 1 func applic...

Capabilities Search In your project settings, you can search for capabilities you want to add (instead of scrolling down the list and turning things “on” or “off”). Editor Quick Actions Holding the command key down while mousing over and clicking on various levels of your code presents a quick actio...

You’ve done the work to get your Core Data model ready, but right when you hit run, wham. Your debug output log shows: Failed to load model named ModelName You you may experience one of these when you attempt to access your persistent container: Fatal error: Unexpectedly found nil while implicitly u...

Resources Using Core Data With CloudKit - WWDC 2019 Session 202 Sample Project from Apple How NSPersistentCloudKitContainer Helps I suppose the first question everyone should ask is, “What’s the big deal? How does NSPersistentCloudKitContainer even help me?” I noted at least three huge wins from the...

“Declarative” is one of Swift UI’s four core principles. Aside from taking for granted that declarative is just “better” than whatever else, how about a visual to understand the declarative way of thinking? Imagine yourself in a restaurant (sit-down or fast food, whichever). When you want a burger, ...

Resources Tutorial Reference Enabling SwiftUI Opting in to using SwiftUI is as easy as creating a new project with Xcode 11 and clicking the “Use SwiftUI” checkbox. Starting Point Xcode will give you two structs to start with: One that describes the View’s content and layout One that declares a prev...

Resources Right-click -> Save as... Swift Playground Setup 1import UIKit 2import PlaygroundSupport 3 4class MyViewController : UIViewController { 5 6 var currencyLabel = UILabel() 7 override func loadView() { 8 let view = UIView() 9 view.backgroundColor = .white 10 11 currencyLabel.frame = CGRect(x:...

Prerequisites No additional R packages are necessary for this notebook to run Cells in this notebook expect the Car Sales.csv file to be in certain locations; specifics are in the cell itself Resources to help you practice are available at the end Load Data From a CSV File File is in the same direct...

Where’s the Live View? So you’ve created a new Single View playground from the template picker… You run the playground right out of the gate to see what you’ve got… But… Where’s the Live View? Showing the Live View To get the live view to show up, you need to open the Assitant Editor. You can do thi...

Sometimes, functions ask you to specify an axis. The documentation can often feel vague and/or technical. For instance, here’s a quote from the apply function’s documentation: axis : {0 or ‘index’, 1 or ‘columns’}, default 0 Axis along which the function is applied: 0 or ‘index’: apply function to e...

Resources Right-click -> Save as... Car Sales.xlsx load-excel-file-with-python-pandas.ipynb Prerequisites Install the Pandas library for your Python environment Cells in this notebook expect the Car Sales.xlsx file to be in certain locations; specifics are in the cell itself Resources to help you pr...

Resources Right-click -> Save as... Car Sales.csv load-csv-file-with-python-pandas.ipynb Prerequisites Install the Pandas library for your Python environment Cells in this notebook expect the Car Sales.csv file to be in certain locations; specifics are in the cell itself Resources to help you practi...

Command Mode (Blue) Shortcut What Happens h Shows a pop-up window listing out all keyboard shortcuts cmd + shift + p (Mac) ctrl + shift + p (Win) Shows the Command Palette enter Goes into Edit Mode (green) for the currently selected cell ctrl + enter Runs the selected cell shift + enter Runs the sel...

Prerequisites: The SqlServer PowerShell module must be installed. Run Install-Module -Name SqlServer if you need to install it… create-credential.ps1 1import-module SqlServer 2 3$storageAccount = "<StorageAccountName>" #replace this with your Azure storage account name 4$storageKey = "<StorageAccoun...

Step away from inferential statistics for a while and the interpretation of Type I and Type II errors in hypothesis testing could slip away. How about a mnemonic to help solidify the concepts? To frame the mnemonic, consider the following scenario: A man has been charged with murder and you’re on th...

We’ve all been there. Do a search on the topic of “saving data in iOS” and you’ll get dozens of search results mentioning at least six different frameworks and platforms, and a month’s worth of reading. Wouldn’t it be nice to distill the possibilities down into just what you need in order to start d...

What is the tilde (~) “symbol” in R? If you were to put words to what it is, how would you explain it or interpret it? What does it mean (and therefore, what does it do)? Here, I document a few of the unpackings that I’ve run across when it comes to ~ in R. From the Docs: “y on x” In the R-project.o...

Data is making it to the Event Hub…at least you’re 99% sure it is, because successful requests are being made by your app/device and received by the Hub. The trouble is, when you attempt to sample data with Azure Stream Analytics, you come up empty with a message like No events found for HubName. or...

It’s inevitable - you’re going to encounter job failures when working with Azure Data Lake Analytics U-SQL jobs. Error Sources There are at least three root causes for a U-SQL job failure: A problem with your script A problem with the data A problem with your extractor’s “shematizing” of your data D...

Newbies to U-SQL from T-SQL will soon run face-first into the wall that I ran into. Where T-SQL isn’t picky about stuff like capitalization and terminating semicolons, U-SQL definitely is. If you happen to fail at capitalizing one of the U-SQL keywords like SELECT or FROM, or if you miss a ; somewhe...

At the core of developing a seamless and collaborative data sharing experience for Apple’s platforms is a thorough knowledge of CloudKit. In this course, you’ll learn to leverage Apple’s flagship framework to achieve your app’s remote data storage and data sharing requirements. First, you’ll learn h...

In this video I pop the hood on Core Data’s SQLite persistent store to discover the details about whether or not you need to add a property representing a “primary key” for your Core Data Entities. Take a look and be sure to subscribe for to stay connected to future screen casts! Transcript I had a ...

When it comes to remote backend services for mobile apps, you’ve got options. What’s the case for CloudKit? Where does Apple’s remote data storage and sharing solution fit into the Apple Developer’s toolbox? I recently put out a survey on Twitter, just to get a feel for what folks are using. #iosdev...

Being able to programmatically create an HDInsight cluster, use it, and subsequently tear it down so that you don’t incur cost is one use-case for maximizing efficient use of Azure’s cloud platform. Here, I want to break the use-case down into chunks: Log in to Azure (PowerShell) The first step is t...

This is a cheat sheet of the code and workflow for iPhone location access and usage, from requesting permission to using the location of the user’s device. Framework Import import CoreLocation Set Location Usage Description in Info.plist This is a required first step If you don’t set this, your app ...

This is a cheat sheet of the code and workflow for iPhone camera access and usage, from requesting permission to using the photo taken with a user’s device. Framework Import import AVFoundation Set Camera Usage Description in Info.plist When you request permission to use the device’s camera, a short...

It’s a fair question: Is dimensional modeling still relevant in the age of big data? Read enough about “big data”, and you may start to get the impression that modeling techniques are old-fashioned or irrelevant. Data professionals in IT departments are used to wrangling data - it’s understood that ...

There’s a strong temptation to equate “predictive analytics” and “machine learning”. It’s not uncommon to throw the terms around interchangeably, which signals that the two are strongly related. BUT. Is there a difference that sometimes gets lost when we substitute one term for the other? If there i...