Blog

Projects

Internal Phone Numbers

Internal Phone Numbers let you quickly lookup phone numbers from your colleagues.

    Development

    CoreGraphics Geometry Primitives

    The article provides a concise guide to Core Graphics geometry types in Swift, essential for Quartz 2D drawing on Apple platforms, covering CGFloat, CGPoint, CGVector, CGSize, and CGRect, with iOS using a top-left origin and macOS a bottom-left origin by default.

    Development

    Guided Access

    Guided Access, introduced in iOS 6, is an accessibility feature that locks an iOS app to prevent unintended exits, configurable to disable specific screen regions, hardware buttons, motion, keyboards, touch, or set time limits, activated via triple-clicking the Home/Side button or Siri.

    Gems

    RealCharlieKirk

    The YouTube channel RealCharlieKirk is run by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, and focuses on conservative political commentary, interviews, and discussions.

    Monthly Updates

    Monthly update #0347 • March 2019

    Monthly update 347 • March 2019 • 2019-03-01 - 2019-03-31

      Development

      Swift 5 Released!

      Swift 5.0 marks a major milestone with ABI stability on Apple platforms, integrating the Swift runtime into macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS for smaller apps and better performance.

      Development

      UTF-8 String

      Swift 5 changes String's preferred encoding from UTF-16 to UTF-8 for better performance in modern computing, like server-side work and C interop, while keeping efficient Objective-C bridging.

      Books

      Campus Battlefield by Charlie Kirk

      Charlie Kirk’s Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters, argues that American colleges have become centres of progressive indoctrination, stifling free speech and conservative values.

      Monthly Updates

      Monthly update #0346 • February 2019

      Monthly update 346 • February 2019 • 2019-02-01 - 2019-02-28

        Development

        JavaScriptCore

        The article explores the JavaScriptCore framework, which integrates WebKit’s JavaScript engine into Swift apps, allowing developers to execute JavaScript code and interoperate with Swift.

        Development

        Behind the Proposal — SE-0200 Enhancing String Literals Delimiters to Support Raw Text

        SE-0200 introduces custom delimiters for Swift string literals in Swift 5, allowing raw text that ignores escape sequences unless adjusted with matching pound signs, blending features from languages like Rust while retaining Swift's interpolation.

        Gems

        Color Spaces

        For the longest time we didn’t have to pay a lot of attention to the way we talk about color. The modern display technologies capable of showing more vivid shades have, for better or for worse, changed the rules of the game.

        Development

        Swift 5.1 Release Process

        Swift 5.1 aims to achieve module stability for the language. On Apple platforms, it keeps binary compatibility with Swift 5.0 and future releases because the ABI is now stable.

        Development

        Evolving Swift On Apple Platforms After ABI Stability

        Swift 5.0 achieves ABI stability on Apple platforms, allowing apps to use the OS-provided Swift runtime instead of bundling it, which reduces download sizes and enables better performance through deeper integration.

        Development

        ABI Stability and More

        Swift 5 achieves ABI stability on Apple platforms, ensuring binary compatibility for apps and libraries across future Swift versions without needing to embed the Swift runtime in app bundles.

        Development

        Introducing the sourcekitd Stress Tester

        Sourcekitd powers essential editor features like code completion and refactoring in Xcode and SourceKit-LSP, handling both syntactic and semantic requests for Swift files.

        Development

        Swift 5 Exclusivity Enforcement

        Swift 5 turns on runtime checks for exclusive access to memory by default in release builds.

        Monthly Updates

        Monthly update #0345 • January 2019

        Monthly update 345 • January 2019 • 2019-01-01 - 2019-01-31

          Development

          Dictionary Services

          The article explores dictionary-related APIs in Swift across Unix, macOS, and iOS, highlighting their role in features like spell check and semantic analysis.

          Monthly Updates

          Monthly update #0344 • December 2018

          Monthly update 344 • December 2018 • 2018-12-01 - 2018-12-31

            Gems

            Exposing Floating Point

            Despite everyday use, floating point numbers are often understood in a hand-wavy manner and their behavior raises many eyebrows.

            Development

            Bundles and Packages

            The article clarifies the distinction between bundles and packages on Apple platforms, often confused due to overlapping use cases.

            Development

            CharacterSet

            The article introduces CharacterSet, a Foundation type in Swift for manipulating Unicode scalar values, distinct from Set<Character> despite its name, as it conforms to the SetAlgebra protocol rather than storing Character values directly.

            Monthly Updates

            Monthly update #0343 • November 2018

            Monthly update 343 • November 2018 • 2018-11-01 - 2018-11-30

              Projects

              SecKey

              SecKey provides one time passwords to be used with the two factor authentication of Dropbox, Google, Facebook, GitHub, Proton Mail and many more.