General Questions

• Can you describe your workflow when you work on creating an iOS app? Sure. iOS is like any other platform or programming environment, and at the beginning, you need to collect a complete or good initial set of program requirements. After you and your coworkers or clients are happy with the requirements, it’s time to start translating the program requirements into your software architecture. If dynamically updating content is a requirement, you’re going to need a backend. If caching or manipulation of content is required, you’re going to need a database, which will determine the structure and nature of your model. If a GUI is required, you’re going to need to define your views. You wrap these components together with a controller, and assure that your naming convention is semantically similar to your problem domain, downloadBusinessInformationFromBackend,storeBusinessInformationInBackground,updateViewForNewBusinessInformation, etc.

• Are you familiar with CocoaPods? Can you explain what they are and how they work?CocoaPods is a depedancy and package manager for Mac OS X and iOS, it downloads and integrates code from other projects, often through GitHub by use of specs, but it can also be used locally. The benefits of CocoaPods is that it encourages the strict seperation of dependancies and your programs source code, which can decouple your implementation from your dependencies. The downside of CocoaPods is perhaps that it itself is a dependancy on your project, that it makes a number of assumptions about how you want your project organized, and that the process of making a CocoaPod is likely more painful that it needs to be.
• In general, explain software licensing and how this applies to work we do.Software licensing is the legal rules surrounding distribution, use, and modification of source code or executables. It applies to what we do because the license of dependancies often affects how you must license your software or parts of your software or modifications to the software.
• Describe your general testing practices when building an iOS app.I take a broad approach to test practices for iOS. The model is best tested by unit testing, definining rigorouse and complete sets of inputs and expected outputs for your data model. This assures correctness at your app’s most fundamental level. The controller is best tested with asserts to assure that they are used and modified in expected ways. Of course, you can place asserts in your model code too, but I think the unit tests are really doing the work there. The view code is best tested by QA testers, and like the model, it can contain asserts to assure good input, but ultimately the correctness of views is determined by good user experience and expected behavior.
• How can apps support other languages, date formats and currencies?
  1. The use of NSLocalizedString allows you to use a dictionary to define your applications strings, and switch what the dictionary returns based on the region.
  2. The use of NSDateFormatter allows you to display dates in a user’s expected format, and local.
  3. The use of NSNumberFormatter will display currencies with their varying typographical conventions according the locale the user is in, Apple has graciously performed the heavy lifting here.
• What is Instruments and how is it useful?Instruments is a application performance analyzer and visualizer for iOS and Mac OS X apps and it’s built-in to Xcode. It allows you to profile for memory use and potential memory leaks.
  • User events, such as keyboard keys pressed and mouse moves and clicks with exact time.
  • CPU activity of processes and threads.
  • Memory allocation and release, garbage collection and memory leaks.
  • File reads, writes, locks.
  • Network activity and traffic.
  • Graphics and inner workings of OpenGL.

iOS Technologies Questions

• Explain Handoff, and in general, how it it allows iOS and Mac/web apps to communicate?Handoff is a feature of iOS and Mac OS X that allows a user to switch seamlessly between the two OSs or other devices without reconfiguring each device.To use Handoff, you create a user acitivity object for everything your user is doing, and update it as the user performs actions, and configure your app using that user activity when a user switches devices.
• What technologies/services are contained inside of iCloud?iCloud is at least four difference technologies and services presented under a unified banner to the user. There is key-valued cloud storage, which is good for user preferences, settings, and simple app states.There is iCloud document storage, which is keeping you application’s user created documents in cloud storage so they can access and modify them anywhere. This is related to the NSDocument and UIDocument class cluster.There is Core Data storgage, which allows a developer to take their applications data, whatever it might be, and sync it across devices using iCloud. This is related to the NSManagedObject cluster of classes.Finally, there is CloudKit storage, which allows for public and private cloud storage, where users can interact with one another and share data.
• What is an iOS extension? Can you list a few examples of popular/common extensions?An app extension lets you define code which users can run from outside of the context of your active and running app. You might define an extension for use in the Today view, the Share view, edit a photgraph, or even make a custom keyboard on iOS.
• What is HealthKit?HealthKit is a way for apps to register to provide health and fitness data for the user to view in iOS’s Health app. Apps can also access the raw data for each source which the user has in HealthKit and perform it’s own operations on it.
• What is HomeKit?HomeKit provides a standardized way for connected home automation devices to communicate. Users can configure devices and actions and trigger them with Siri using HomeKit.
• What is Apple Pay? Could you describe a way we could use it in our applications?Apple Pay takes the PassKit framework from iOS and allows users to enter in their bank accounts as passes. A way you could use this in your application is if you want to allow users to buy goods or services at your store, utilizing Apple Pay as a point of sale system.
• Explain application sandboxing.Application sandboxing is limiting a program’s capabilities to match it’s expected behavior. It might not allow access to certain APIs if the user has not granted the program the permission to use them, such as local services or address book integration.
• What is VoiceOver? Explain some of the accessibility features included in iOS and how developers can utilize them.VoiceOver increases accessibility for blind and low-vision users, and for users with certain learning challenges. If standard, library provided UIViews are used, almost no, if any, additional work is required to use accesibility features. If you go more custom, you’re going to have to define how VoiceOver with more information to accurately describe your app.
• How does application multitasking work on iOS?If a user is finished using an app for the time being, first the application goes into a background state. This is the first step in the application being suspended. In this period, the app can ask for more execution time or to execute certain tasks in the background. Barring these possibility, the app is suspended. This is when apps are in memory but not executing code. As other apps are brought to be active and if the user doesn’t bring the app back to an active state, the app may be purged from memory to make room for other apps.The states are:
  • Not running, not been launched or been terminated.
  • Inactive, the app is in the foreground but not currently receiving events.
  • Active, the app is running. Foreground.
  • Bacgrkound, the app is in the background and executing code, but unless it requests more time, it will be only briefly.
  • Suspended, the app was executing and is no longer, but has been placed in memory in antipation of becoming active again. Can be purged.
• What features does Game Center offer for iOS games?
  • Configure leaderboards and sets
  • Configure achievments
  • Configure groups
  • Matchmaking and multiplayer
• What are iBeacons?iBeacons are bluetooth devices that can be used to let your app know how close a device is to a beacon. For instance, if iBeacons were on a hiking trail, and iOS developer could use the Core Location framework to determine which trail a user was on, and then display information about the trail as the get close to each beacon.
• What is Cocoa/Cocoa Touch?Cocoa include the Foundation and AppKit frameworks, and it is used for developing applications for Mac OS X.Cocoa Touch includes Foundation and the UIKit frameworks, and it is used for developing applications that run on iOS.The term “Cocoa” has been used to refer generically to any class or object that is based on the Objective-C runtime and inherits from the root class, NSObject.The Foundation framework implements a root class, NSObject, and includes internationalization, persistence, filesystem access. It’s the level at which one uses ports, threads, locks, and processes. Foundation is based on the Core Foundation framework.

  AppKit and UIKit are for developing an application’s user interface.

• Explain in general, what Core Audio, Core Data, and Core Location are, and how they help iOS apps.
  • Core Audio: Core Audio provides software interfaces for implementing audio features in applications you create for iOS and OS X. Under the hood, it handles all aspects of audio on each of these platforms. In iOS, Core Audio capabilities include recording, playback, sound effects, positioning, format conversion, and file stream parsing
  • Core Data: This manages the data model of an app in terms of MVC design pattern. At runtime, entities are created, managed, and made available through the Core Data framework with no additional work above and beyond defining your schema.
  • Core Location: Provides location and heading information to iOS apps. The framework uses GPS, cell, and WiFi radios to find the users latitude and longitude.
• Describe the role of SpriteKit and SceneKit.SpriteKit is a graphic rendering and animation infrastructure that you can use to animate textured images. It is meant for games and visualizations, and does most of the work of making sure that drawing in a scene is as efficient as possible on iOS hardware.SceneKit is a framework for building simple games and app user interfaces with 3D graphics. SceneKit lets you define your 3D scene in terms of cameras, actors, bounds, light, and content, and then translates that into the necessary optimaized lower-level OpenGL ES code.
• What is Metal?The Metal shading language is a unified programming language for writing both graphics and compute kernel functions that are used by apps written with the Metal framework.