Published on
Working with REST APIs you have no control over can be a little monotonous. This is especially for OAuth 2.0 API that need you to do a little bit of setup, get your API keys with the service provider, and then you need to do the setup on your app’s size: Configure your URL scheme, deal with that URL Scheme, and write code that does something when your app gets called with that URL.
Published on
It is no surprise that software tend to write logs to a local file as they execute. As events, errors, or exceptional situations occur, a lot of software takes note of them using a local logging solution. This is done because these practices can allow us to troubleshoot problems for our users, find bugs, and in general understand the behavior of our software in untested or lesser tested scenarios.
When comes to iOS and other Apple platforms, there have always been third party dependencies that allow you to do this. A lot of developers roll their own solution and write events in plain text files. It wasn’t until iOS 8 and macOS 10.10 that Apple provided us with a unified logging system that is easy to use and is very performant - OSLog.
Published on
It’s not news that iOS has a heavy a focus on privacy and security. Apple provides us with many tools to make encryption easy, like CryptoKit, a high-level Cryptography framework on iOS. When CryptoKit is not enough, we can leverage older, lower-level APIs to do more cryptographic operations or use cyphers not covered by CryptoKit. We can even make use of the Secure Enclave to leverage hardware-level security to our apps.
This is all cool and dandy but did you know that you don’t need to leverage any of the technologies above to secure data in your app? In this article we will provide a much simpler method to protect user data, without having to know the first thing about Cryptography at all, and without compromising security at all. If you know you need to protect data, you can consider this option before even considering directly dealing with cryptography at all.
Published on
Combine allows us to create pipelines for a lot of tasks. Thanks to the fact it can do work concurrently without leveraging callbacks, it is very easy to build things that would otherwise be very complex.
In this short article, we will build a file download queue that downloads images sequentially. You can use this as the base for more complex queues.
The queue will download an array of images sequentially. If you wanted to support concurrent queues, it would probably be wise to instantiate this publisher as many times as necessary.
Published on
Apple introduced modern background tasks last year on iOS 13. These new APIs have been out for a little over year (counting the beta period). Many developers have tried to adopt them to moderate success. Many of them have found them to be very unpredictable and that only work a fraction of the time. If you look around the internet (and even on the comments in that article), you will see many developers weren’t able to get them to work as expected.
Published on
Xcode 12 introduces the ability for developers to add their own SwiftUI views and modifiers to the Xcode library. This allows people using your code to discover your custom views, makes your codebase easier to learn, and it allows you to visually edit complex views visually rather than with code.
In this short article we will explore how we can add our own views and modifiers to the Xcode library.
Published on
Two of the concepts used a lot in Reactive Programming are the Future and Promises. Whether you have been using Combine for a while or are new to Reactive Programming, chances are you have seen these two words. These terms date to years ago. And I would be lying if I told you I knew what that they were for until I started learning Combine. The first time I heard about Futures and Promises was back in my NodeJS job half a decade ago, and I didn’t understand these concepts back then.
Published on
There are times when we may want to share data across instances of our app running on different physical devices. You could develop a server or even leverage cloud storage, but did you know Apple provides a framework to share data directly across devices, without having to use an intermediary? This framework is the MultipeerConnectivity framework, and it has actually been around for a while. In this article, we will explore this framework to understand how we can use it to share data across instances of our app in different devices directly.
Published on
WWDC2020 brought many interesting and unexpected updates to many old and well known APIs. In this article, we will explore what’s new with UIDatePicker on iOS, an API that has existed since the dawn of time and hasn’t changed much since its introduction.
UIDatePicker is an API that has existed since the very early days of the iOS SDK - it goes all the way back to iOS 2.0.
Published on
UIMenu is a new set of APIs that were originally introduced in iOS 13. The API allows us to add menus to different parts of our UIs, including binding actions to key combinations when using your iOS or iPadOS device with a keyboard. Starting on iOS and iPadOS 14 (and ported to macOS Catalyst), this object is more prevalent in the UI thanks to the fact it can be invoqued from different actions.
