About UICollectionViews 🤔

[MertCelik]

I remember @zenangst was talking about UICollectionView at mobile era conf. You were saying that you were afraid of them at the beginning. Do you have any good starting point(to read or try), for overcoming the same fear?

[zenangst]

Hey @MertCelik,

Well, I basically started of by just building collection views in isolation, you could start with a simple application or a playground. Set low goals and then gradually build upon it. The main reason for my fear when I started out was just all the exceptions that can be thrown if you misconfigure your UICollectionViewFlowLayout. This was kind of irrational because as soon as you stumble onto something that needs solving it also means that you are learning.

When it comes to resources, objc.io has some fantastic issue on the topic.

• Custom Collection View Layouts
• Animating Collection Views

And then there is always the WWDC sessions that also are pretty ace to watch.

Last but not least, checking out open source on GitHub is also highly recommended, especially if find issues around optimizations or bugs that have a PR attached to it. Then you get both the problem and the answered all served up.

Hope this helps, if you find some additional resources that I might have missed then I'd appreciate it if you just hit me up on Twitter, you can never learn enough :)

[zenangst]

Hey @MertCelik, just wanted to follow up a bit on this. So, I've started building my own library to build collection views called Blueprints. You can find it here: Blueprints, hope that can help you overcome your collection view fears. If you have any questions about it, just let me know and I'll do my best to help out :)

[MertCelik]

Hey @zenangst , thank you very much for the tips! I have one nice app coming with collection views. I will dig into Blueprints and let you know if I have any questions about it!