If you have sent any plaintext confidential emails to someone (most likely you did), have you ever questioned yourself about the mail being tampered with or read by anyone during transit? If not, you should!
Any unencrypted email is like a postcard. It can be seen by anyone (crackers/security hackers, corporations, governments, or anyone with the required skills), during its transit.
In 1991 Phil Zimmermann, a free speech activist, and anti-nuclear pacifist developed Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the first software available to the general public that utilized RSA (a public key cryptosystem, will discuss it later) for email encryption and signing. Zimmermann, after having had a friend post the program on the worldwide Usenet, got prosecuted by the U.S. government; later he was charged by the FBI for illegal weapon export because encryption tools were considered as such (all charges were eventually dropped). Zimmermann later founded PGP Inc., which is now part of Symantec Corporation.
In 1997 PGP Inc. submitted a standardization proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force. The standard was...
In WWDC 2019, Apple announced a brand new feature for Xcode 11; the capability to create a new kind of binary frameworks with a special format called XCFramework. That was fantastic news to anyone, since an ongoing inconvenient situation that was lasting for years finally came to its end. Up until then, a binary framework could be used in one target platform only, and for a specific family of devices. For example, it was officially impossible to build a framework that would contain code aiming on both real iOS devices and the Simulator; unofficial solutions had come up of course […]
The tab bar interface appears in some of the most popular mobile apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. A tab bar appears at the bottom of an app screen and let users quickly switch between different functions of an app. In UIKit, you use the UITabBarController to create the tab bar interface. For the SwiftUI framework, it provides a UI component called TabView for developers to display tabs in the apps. In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a tab bar interface using TabView, handle the tab selection, and customize the appearance of the tab bar. […]
We are launching the update of our Mastering SwiftUI book for Xcode 12 and iOS 14. Along with the release of Xcode 12, Apple released a big update to the SwiftUI framework with a lot of additions. Other than adding new UI components to streamline your UI development, Xcode 12 introduces a new App lifecycle API for SwiftUI. There are no more AppDelegate and SceneDelegate in the project. In other words, you can build a pure SwiftUI-based on iOS 14. All the content and projects of our Mastering SwiftUI book are updated to use this new lifecycle. You will learn […]
In iOS 14, Apple introduced a lot of new additions to the SwiftUI framework like LazyVGrid and LazyHGrid. But matchedGeometryEffect is the new one that really caught my attention because it allows developers to create some amazing view animations with a few lines of code. The SwiftUI framework already makes it easy for developers to animate changes of a view. The matchedGeometryEffect modifier just takes the implementation of view animations to the next level. For any mobile apps, it is very common that you need to transit from one view to another. Creating a delightful transition between views will definitely […]
By the time SwiftUI was announced and given to developers in WWDC 2019, it was made obvious that this was going to be the future for developing applications for all Apple devices. However, even though SwiftUI might be the framework that will dominate on UI creation sooner or later, UIKit is still here, and WWDC 2020 came to prove that with some great additions and improvements announced this year. Most of those improvements took place for making it easier to port iPadOS apps to macOS and achieve the maximum possible compatibility. That doesn’t mean though that they can’t be used […]
Earlier, we wrote a tutorial on customizing the appearance of a SwiftUI button. This week, let’s see how to customize the look & feel of a SwiftUI toggle. If you’ve read the tutorial, you know we can use a protocol called ButtonStyle to create your own button style for customizations. For toggles, the customization can be achieved by adopting the ToggleStyle protocol. Later in this tutorial, we will make use of the protocol to transform a toggle from the standard appearance to a checkbox. First, let’s start with the basics. In SwiftUI, you create a toggle by using the Toggle […]
When a macOS user specifically grants a sandboxed app access to a file/folder outside of that app’s container, that special access only survives until the app is closed. If the user reopens the app and wants to again read from and write to that “outside” folder, they have to go through the whole process of showing macOS their “intent” to stray out of the container — unless the developer adds something called “security-scoped bookmarks.” These bookmarks are the topic of today’s tutorial. I’ll be explaining in-depth how developers can create these special bookmarks, store them, access them later, including two […]
WWDC20 finished almost two months ago, but still we are all talking about the new frameworks, APIs, and improvements announced this year. Among all those there’s something that is going to have a strong impact to the way we work when implementing in-app purchases in our apps. That is the brand new capability of testing StoreKit locally in Xcode 12. Up until now one had to stop the development workflow and visit the App Store Connect in order to create the necessary in-app purchase records and at least one sandbox user so testing is possible. After having gone through all […]
We’ve been working with Vardhan Agrawal, an iOS developer who has been actively contributed to the machine learning community, to write a book on machine learning and Core ML. Now we are happy to announce that the book “Mastering Machine Learning with Core ML and Python” is now available for early access. This book covers Core ML in-depth. You will learn how to create and deploy your own machine learning model. On top of that, you will learn about Turi Create, Create ML, Keras, Firebase, and Jupyter Notebooks, just to name a few. All these are professional tools which are […]
Have you ever used the magic move animation in Keynote? With magic move, you can easily create slick animation between slides. Keynote automatically analyzes the objects between slides and renders the animations automatically. To me, SwiftUI has brought Magic Move to app development. Animations using the framework are automatic and magical. You define two states of a view and SwiftUI will figure out the rest, animating the changes between these two states. SwiftUI empowers you to animate changes for individual views and transitions between views. The framework already comes with a number of built-in animations to create different effects. In […]
WWDC 2020 introduced several new features and improvements in the entire spectrum of develpment in Apple ecosystem, and definitely every developer found lots of things to get excited with. One of those features regard Xcode 12 and SwiftUI, and we briefly met it in this previous post about what’s new in Xcode 12 and SwiftUI. It is the ability given to developers to create reusable SwiftUI views and modifiers using LibraryContentProvider, and add them as new items to Xcode’s library. One might wonder why this is such a big deal so it deserves a whole new tutorial to discuss about […]
Hey everyone and welcome back to the second and final part of this tutorial series where we explore the intricacies of Apple’s MusicKit by building our very own music player in SwiftUI that can stream songs from our Apple Music account. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can do that here. In the last tutorial, we looked at how to create a MusicKit Identifier for our Apple Developer account, created a JSON Web Token private key, and we were able to successfully make web requests to the Apple Music API. At the end of the tutorial, we also built […]
Feature Flags can improve your continuous integration process in a number of ways. This post will focus on how CloudBees Feature Flags can help improve your developer productivity and shorten the feedback loop with the Flag Override view for frontend validation. It includes Javascript in examples, but the override view can be used in all available platforms. The flag override view is a lightweight UI element that is very useful for debugging purposes. This override view exposes the current status for each flag set by developers and allows users to override these flags. All this is accomplished from within a handy popup in […]
While I’ve introduced you quite a number of new features announced in WWDC 2020. Let’s step back a bit and check out a useful framework introduced in WWDC 2019. At first glance, it does not look as significant or important as other frameworks, however it consists of a really useful tool when it is needed. That is the LinkPresentation framework, and it provides a handful of built-in functionalities that makes presenting rich links in apps a really simple and straightforward process. LinkPresentation framework contains mechanisms that parse the website behind a link and fetch metadata necessary in order to display […]
macOS developers will most likely be faced with the requirement to build an installer for apps they want to — or must — distribute outside of the Mac App Store (MAS). There is also substantial economic incentive to explore macOS development targeting sales outside of the MAS. In this tutorial, I’ll be explaining how to use Packages, by far one of the most popular tools for developing macOS app installers. It is used by macOS developers worldwide. I’ll provide step-by-step instructions, including many screenshots, walking you through the entire process of building installers. Very importantly, Packages is freeware. A 2019 […]
WWDC 2020 was finished just a few days ago under unprecedented conditions for first time. Virtually, all developers around the globe had the chance for a seat in the front row, being able to learn about all new features and improvements that Apple had to announce this year right at the moment they were becoming available. As always, lots of new stuff and great advancements were introduced, and once again everybody has got really excited and eager to try many new things out. This post is dedicated to the base that makes everything else real; Xcode and Swift. The first […]
The first version of SwiftUI doesn’t come with a native UI component for multiline text field. For multiline input, you can wrap a UITextView from the UIKit framework and make it available to your SwiftUI project by adopting the UIViewRepresentable protocol. We have written a detailed tutorial on the implementationg, showing you how to create a multiline text field in SwiftUI. In iOS 14, which is expected to be released in late Sep, Apple introduced a new component called TextEditor for the SwiftUI framework. This TextEditor enables developers to display and edit multiline text in your apps. In this tutorial, […]
SwiftUI list is very similar to UITableView in UIKit. In the first release of SwiftUI, Apple’s engineers already made creating list view construction a breeze. You do not need to create a prototype cell and there is no delegate/data source protocol. With just a few lines of code, you can build a list view with custom cells. In iOS 14, Apple continued to improve the List view and introduce several new features. In this tutorial, we will show you how to build an expandable list / outline view and explore the inset grouped list style. Building an Expandable List View […]
The initial release of SwiftUI didn’t come with a native collection view. You can either build your own solution or use third party libraries. In this year’s WWDC, Apple introduced tons of new features for the SwiftUI framework. One of them is to address the need of implementing grid views. SwiftUI now provides developers two new UI components called LazyVGrid and LazyHGrid. One is for creating vertical grid and the other is for horizontal grid. The word Lazy, as mentioned by Apple, means that the grid view does not create items until they are needed. In this tutorial, I will […]
Did you know that a macOS app can read and write outside of its container when sandboxed? Did you know that a non-sandboxed macOS app has no container? Were you aware that you can sell and distribute non-sandboxed macOS apps without using the Mac App Store? Since the focus of most Apple development seems concentrated on iOS, many developers probably take the sandbox for granted. Some might not even be fully aware of the sandbox’s existence, especially in the case of iOS where all apps must be sandboxed. By ignoring the sandbox — and possibly macOS development entirely — developers […]
Earlier, we explored the use of UIViewRepresentable and show you how to integrate UITextView into a SwiftUI project. While you can use the UIViewRepresentable protocol to wrap a UIKit view, but how about a view controller? You probably need to use camera or access the user’s photo library in your app. So, how can use integrate the UIImagePickerController class into your SwiftUI view? In this tutorial, we will walk you through the integration by using the UIViewControllerRepresentable protocol. It’s very similar to the UIViewRepresentable protocol, but UIViewControllerRepresentable is designed for wrapping a UIKit view controller. If you have already read […]
One of the most common tasks that iOS -and not only- developers are called to perform in their programming endeavours is fetching and managing remote images that should be displayed to an app. For instance, suppose that you’re building the next great messaging application where obviously users have contacts. Those contacts have avatar images residing to a server. When users connect to the app then avatars must be downloaded in order to be used by the app. Or, another example, think of an app that manages the event of a worldwide convention, and among its features is the list of […]
Since the advent of OS X Mojave and especially Catalina and the requirement for app notarization, some of us old-time macOS developers are concerned that Apple will pull the plug on the apps that we distribute ourselves. Many of you have downloaded and installed macOS software directly from websites, i.e., not from the Mac App Store. Have you ever really considered it? You can’t download an iOS app outside of the App Store. Yes, I know about the Apple Developer Enterprise Program, but it only “allows large organizations to develop and deploy proprietary, internal-use apps to their employees.” How many […]
Welcome to another macOS tutorial! In this post we are about to learn how to create a macOS application that belongs to a unique category of apps; a category that is quite common but also quite important, and contains a large number of existing and new macOS apps. We are going to learn how to create a document based application. It would be pointless to try to give a definition about what a document based app is, as you can immediately get it; just think of the browser that you’re reading this post now, or Xcode, or even TextEdit app. […]
The List view in SwiftUI is very similar to the table view in UIKit. It is also designed for developers to present a list of items row by row. By default, each row of data is separated by a line separator. In UIKit, you can easily control the appearance and color of the line separator. Unfortunately, there is no official way to remove line separators in SwiftUI. That said, we can make use of the UIKit API to tweak the line separator of the List view in SwiftUI. In this article, we will show you how this can be done. […]
I enjoy so much working with the SwiftUI framework. Like most new frameworks, however, one drawback is that it doesn’t come with all UI controls which are available in UIKit. For example, you can’t find a SwiftUI counterpart of text view. Thankfully, Apple provided a protocol called UIViewRepresentable that allows you easily wrap a UIView and make it available to your SwiftUI project. In this article, we will show you how to create a text view by wrapping the UITextView class from UIKit using UIViewRepresentable. Editor’s note: If you are new to SwiftUI, you can check out our introductory tutorial. […]
One recent question I got is about the implementation of search bar in SwiftUI projects. Unlike UIKit, SwiftUI doesn’t come with a built-in control for search bar. You may use the UIViewRepresentable protocol to reuse UISearchBar in your SwiftUI project. However, as you look at the search bar, it’s not too difficult to build one entirely using SwiftUI. In this tutorial, let’s try to build a SwiftUI version of search bar. The figure below gives you an idea about the search bar we’re going to build. The look & feel is the same as that of UISearchBar in UIKit. We […]
Welcome to another programming tutorial in the Swift programming language! Today we we are going to talk about a topic that usually everybody knows something more or less, but it’s important for new developers in Swift to really understand what is all about and how it works. It’s quite often for the subject of our discussion not to receive the proper attention, so it’s either misused or not used at all. It’s a topic that the more someone advances in Swift, the more necessary it becomes in order to write better and clearer code. And that topic is about Access […]
Apple’s “app group” technology allows a collection of macOS (or iOS) apps from the same development team, developer, vendor, etc., to all communicate with each other, coordinate functionality, share resources, and minimize redundancies. Apple says this capability “allows the apps within the group to share Mach and POSIX semaphores and to use certain other IPC [interprocess communication] mechanisms among the group’s members.” A word of caution, though: I’ve experienced inconsistent and erratic behavior with macOS app groups, especially on OS X 10.15, Catalina. As explained below, you may have to experiment with the app group ID format. Nonetheless, this tutorial […]
At WWDC 2017, Apple announced MusicKit, a framework to help developers build apps that allow users to play Apple Music and their local music library. Unlike most frameworks like ARKit or CoreML, MusicKit cannot be added to your code with a simple import function. Rather, it’s a combination of the Apple Music API, the StoreKit framework, the MediaPlayer framework, and some other web-based technologies. You may be wondering why is this framework so difficult to integrate into your applications compared to other API and frameworks. This is because MusicKit was not only built to work on iOS devices, but Android […]
One of the most common operations macOS users perform and they are quite familiar with is drag and drop. On a daily basis we all drag things around when working on our Macs. We drag files, text, images, and many, many more. Dragging is a kind of action that users expect to find pretty much in every app on macOS, so supporting it in our apps is something we should seriously consider. A drag operation starts somewhere, so it has a source, and it ends somewhere, so there is a destination. Dragging source and destination can be either within the […]
“I only have an iPad. Can I use it to develop iOS apps?” This is one of the most common questions for beginners. My answer is always “No, you need a Mac to run Xcode for iOS app development.” “But how about Swift Playgrounds for iPad? Can I use the app to learn Swift and app development?” I believe you know Apple released an app called Swift Playgrounds for iPad. The first version of the iPad app was released in September 2016 with the aim to make it easy for everyone to learn the basics of programming, in particular, the […]
Earlier, we published a SwiftUI tutorial showing you how to create perspective text using the framework. It’s very much like Star Wars’ perspective text but without animation. This week, Priyans Brahmbhatt will teach you how to add animations to the perspective text. Since this article was built on the top of the perspective text tutorial, I highly recommend you to check it out first. We will start from where the previous tutorial ended. Let’s have a look at the code again: Animating the Text Using SwiftUI Before writing the code, let’s think about how we can achieve the animation. I […]
Welcome to a new and interesting enough programming tutorial! Swift is a rich-featured language and it couldn’t be missing a great feature such as the higher order functions. According to Wikipedia: In mathematics and computer science, a higher-order function is a function that does at least one of the following: – takes one or more functions as arguments (i.e. procedural parameters), – returns a function as its result. All other functions are first-order functions. From the practical point of view in real world programming, higher order functions consist all together of a great tool that we can only have benefits […]