Vibration and physical feedback has become an important feature of Apple’s operating systems. Starting with the Apple Watch, Apple replaced the traditional vibration feedback with haptic feedback hardware, which allowed them to have more control over how vibrations and physical feedback work.
First being introduced in the Apple Watch, Haptic Feedback has been a core part of the Apple ecosystem experience since. Just think about it, wouldn’t it be weird if you force-touched the screen to do something, and there was no physical response from the device? Think of the old Peek-and-Pop. If you updated to iOS 13 and got context menus, you may feel they feel great to do in iOS (because they have a haptic engine), but on iPad they feel lacking because the device doesn’t vibrate when triggering them.
Very often, we need to deal with data in a “raw” format that, if displayed directly to the user, it makes little sense to them. This kind of data includes a date timestamp, the number of bytes in a big file, or numbers with no rounding a bunch of decimals. There is a lot of data like this, and we need to be able to format it and show it to the user.
On WWDC2019, Apple decided to fork iOS into two different operating systems: iOS for iPhones, and iPadOS for iPads. This is to recognize the iPad as its own independent entity that has its own set of features compared to iOS. Amongst those features, iPadOS adds Multiwindow support, which allows our apps to run in more than one Window at the same time.
What exactly is Multi-window support, and how does it work?
iOS 9 introduced the Slide Over and Split Screen features for iPad, which allowed us to run two different apps side by side at the same time. Multi-window support on iPadOS allows you to do this with two windows of your own app, and more.
Error handling when expecting a result out of an operation is a very common thing to do. For this reason, various high-level programming languages have introduced a Result type into their libraries, on top of their existing error-handling features. This feature was implemented in Swift 5.
A Result wraps a success or a failure. It is essentially an enum with two possible cases: .success and .failure. The .success case wraps the correct result of an operation, whereas a .failure wraps an Error. Its implementation uses generics, so you always know what you are going to get back.
If you have been programming for Apple platforms for a while, chances are you have seen (or maybe even wrote yourself) a line of code that looks like this:
Whether you wrote it yourself or someone else did it, one thing is clear: This is not a safe way to build URLs. Can you know, for sure, that your URL is actually valid? Intuitively, all of us can see a URL and see if it’s valid, but there is a whole lot of governing in the URL format that at some point we may find funny URLs that look valid and aren’t, or the other way around; they look invalid, but aren’t.
When we are working with apps on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, or TVOS, it’s possible that at some point we will have to store and retrieve a lot of temporary data throughout the lifecycle of our software. Depending on our needs, we may need to cache data on disk and manually manage it ourselves, or we may only need it to cache it in memory. In the case of the latter, Apple offers NSCache, a mutable collection that lets us cache files in memory using key-value pairs.
The original title for this article was posted on my old website in 2012 and it was titled “Multithreading on iOS And Mac OS X Using NSOperations”. The original examples were written in Objective-C. This article has been rewritten from scratch not only to give the examples in Swift, but also to improve the quality of the old article. It has been shortened, and both language and tone have been revised.
The original version of this article was titled “rclone and Encryption Tutorial” and was posted in the old version of my website. The original article was written in February 2017 for a much older version of rclone. This revised article covers rclone 1.48, and it has been rewritten from scratch to improve its quality. The examples used in the original article have been kept.
rclone is a command line tool, similar to rsync, with the difference that it can sync, move, copy, and in general do other file operations on cloud storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive. You can use rclone to create backups of your servers or personal computers or to simply store your files in the cloud, optionally adding encryption.
