Make no mistake, a tiny keyboard on a slab of glass doesn’t always lend itself to perfect typing. Whether for accuracy or hilarity, anyone typing on an iOS device notices when autocorrect steps in to help out. You might not know, however, that UIKit includes a class to help you with your user’s typing inside your app.

With 2015 behind us and the new year begun, it’s time again for an NSHipster tradition: reader submissions! As in year’s past, this installment is chock full of tips and tricks that can help ease your days working with Xcode, Swift, and Objective-C.

Recently, Swift 2.0 introduced two new control statements that aim to simplify and streamline the programs we write: guard and defer. While the first by its nature makes our code more linear, the other defers execution of its contents. How should we approach these new control statements? How can guard and defer help us clarify the correspondence between the program and the process?

As part of the push for greater productivity on the iPad, iOS 9 adds Discoverability, an overlay showing the currently available key commands inside an app. This small change suddenly makes key commands far more viable on the iPad and, with it, makes UIKeyCommand a necessary addition to your app.

As an iOS developer, if you want to make an application on your own, you sometimes need to write back-end code. Even for the developer who can take that on, there is more than just the code, there’s also maintenance. Your worst fear becomes not that people might not like your application, but that your server might fail under heavy traffic.

Fortunately, we now have CloudKit. Apple takes care of all these details, so you can focus on how to make your application great.

WWDC 2015 may not have packed quite as many fireworks as its predecessor, but neither was it short on the new and shiny. For this week’s issue, we’ll take a look at some of the changes that iOS 9 brings to the APIs we already know and love.

As consumer web technologies and enterprises race towards cloud infrastructure, there is a curious and significant counter-movement towards connected devices. The Multipeer Connectivity APIs, introduced in iOS 7, therefore may well be the most significant for the platform.

NSString is the crown jewel of Foundation. But as powerful as it is, one would be remiss not to mention its toll-free bridged cousin, CFMutableString—or more specifically, CFStringTransform.

Once again, encoding our logical universe into the cold, calculating bytecode of computers forces us to deal with these questions one way or another. And as you’ll see from our discussion of boolean types in Objective-C and its kin, truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

NSPredicate is a Foundation class that specifies how data should be fetched or filtered. Its query language, which is like a cross between a SQL WHERE clause and a regular expression, provides an expressive, natural language interface to define logical conditions on which a collection is searched.