You probably received some unwanted phone calls on your iPhone and you wished you could automatically block these numbers. Or you were getting a call from someone that's not in your contacts, but you...
We already talked about CallKit and how to use the system UI to display the standard calling UI for incoming/outgoing calls. CallKit is great for displaying the UI, but what when your app is in the...
There's an easy way to display the system UI for incoming or outgoing calls, much like the standard phone app. In this article you'll get an intro to CallKit so you can provide a consistent...
There are many tasks that can be automated when doing pull requests. And the more of these tasks we can automate the more time we'll have to focus on reviewing the actual code and focusing on the...
App Thinning is one of those things that has been around for a while but a lot of people don't really know or care about it. If you're starting a project from scratch most of these things will be...
There's a great little library that will generate classes for accessing your resources, making them type-safe. It's very simple to use and it will make your life a lot easier. In this article we'll...
Spotlight is a great feature that can make life a lot easier for your users. It's build into the system and the users are familiar with it. You can easily integrate with Spotlight by indexing your...
Spotlight Search is a great feature that adds to the user experience. It's very simple to use and with just a little effort you will add a great functionality to your apps. In this short tutorial...
Privacy is very important today and we have a couple of options to encrypt our users' data on iOS. We already have common crypto available on iOS but recently I came across a much simpler library...
We're all used to the default transitions between view controllers that we get for free. But sometimes we just want to keep the users' attention to certain elements. Custom transitions are a great...
RxSwift uses quite a lot of operators utilizing reactive patterns. It is a core part where its magic happens. The Clarke's third law says: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable...
Managing state in your app is not an easy thing to do. Even in a relatively simple app there's a lot of things going on. Users log in, data is being refreshed from multiple sources, errors start...
It's important for our users to have strong passwords. But, strong passwords are usually tedious to type in and often frustrate the users, not to mention that they're hard to remember. In this...
There's a really simple way to read barcodes, QR codes and all sorts of machine readable code by using nothing more than AVFoundation. In this quick article we'll be reading barcodes and QR codes...
Code reviews are an important part of our day-to-day life as developers. They improve the codebase and they help us learn. When we review code, especially when we're under pressure, we could rush...
The Reactive programming is getting popular as it is a completely different paradigm. Programmers use imperative programming quite a long time and it is prevailing nowadays. We are observing the...
Almost every project that you'll work on will have some bugs in it. On some legacy apps you might even spend most of your time debugging. In this article we'll cover some debugging tips&tricks to...
libPhoneNumber-iOS is an iOS port of the Google's libPhoneNumber library. It's very simple to use and with cocoapods it's real easy to get started with it. In this blog post we'll go over setting up...
ResearchKit is a different kind of a framework. It's used in apps that are conducting medical research. Apple has made this framework completely open source and anyone can contribute to it. It's...
HealthKit is Apple's framework for managing health data. In this article we'll go over the basics of using HealthKit and show you how you can read and write data to the health store. We'll create a...
Password strength meters are a great way to visually indicate to the users if their password is acceptable. Implementing one from scratch is no easy feat. Fortunately, dropbox has developed an open...
We don't have a garbage collector in swift, so we need to understand the memory graph of our apps. If we're not careful with object references we can easily create strong reference cycles and leak...
Welcome to my 8th blog post on “iOS Application Security Testing Series”. You can find Part 7 here. In this article, we will look at analyzing the memory contents of an iOS application using Fridump...
When your users are using your app, they expect it to behave like it's constantly running. As you know, iOS can kill your app at any time in order to reclaim system resources. There's an easy way to...
This year the logging framework got a bit of an update. The most notable is definitely the ability to add signposts throughout your code with the new os_signpost functions. Signposts are a great tool...
AVSpeechSynthesizer is a part of the AVFoundation framework that's used to convert text to spoken audio. It's a great tool for converting text to speech and it works surprisingly well. In this short...
Welcome to my 7th blog post on “iOS Application Security Testing Series”. You can find Part Six here. One of the most painstaking aspects of testing against an iOS Application is the efforts of...
Writing unit tests might be boring and tedious work, but like your vegetables, it's good for you :) You realise how valuable unit tests are when you're implementing a new feature on an old piece of...
JavaScript running iOS applications can have the same or close to native performance. Do you believe this or not? Let's find out. The first cross-platform framework that comes to mind is React...
Working in swift (and ObjC) you should be comfortable working with async code. Sooner or later you'll run into a problem called 'callback hell' where in the completion handler of one method you're...
Some time ago I wrote on using realtime database from firebase and about Firebase Cloud Messaging. In this article we'll talk about using Firebase Cloud Functions. With Firebase Cloud Functions you...
fastlane is a very popular automation tool for developers. It can do so much for you: manage code signing, create screenshots, publish betas, upload release builds to iTunes Connect, manage your...
There's a lot of boring tasks that you can automate in your development career. Taking screenshots is definitely one of them. fastlane comes bundled with a nice little tool that makes this very...
If you ever worked in a team you know how messy certificates and provisioning profiles can get. Lately Xcode mitigates most of these age-old problems, but there's one little tool that brings a whole...
Keyboard handling code is something you'll use and reuse across your project. There's a very simple way that you can do this using interface builder objects. It's as simple as dropping an object and...
Unified logging system in a relatively new logging mechanism that was introduced with iOS 10. It's blazingly fast and gives you a fine-grained control over your logs. In this article we'll explore...
Composite pattern is a nice little pattern that will help you manage complex hierarchies. It's commonly used to represent menus and directories/files. In this article we'll go over the theory and...
Iterator pattern is a perfect choice for you when you need to traverse a collection of objects. It's fairly simple and it's so widely used that most collection types implement this pattern in the...
Command pattern is a very simple pattern that allows you to decouple a class that invokes a command from a class that knows how to perform it. This gives you incredible flexibility. In this article...
Chain of responsibility is a well-known pattern that you probably ran into without realising it. In this article we'll continue our journey on design patterns in swift and learn more about chain of...
Welcome to my second article on “Mobile Forensics”. You can find the Part 1 here. The second step in the forensic process is Acquisition. This is referring to retrieval of data from the device,...
If your objects can have multiple states, then you should consider implementing a state pattern. In this article we'll cover some theory on state pattern, and then we'll go over an example on how to...
Welcome to my 6th blog post on “iOS Application Security Testing Series”. You can find Part five here. In this article, we will look at application Re-sign and patching. In a previous blog post, we...
Flawless App is an app built with a specific purpose in mind... To help you make the design of your app pixel perfect. In this short review we'll go over the features of Flawless App and see what it...
You probably know what Google Drive is, just in case you don't... it's a cloud bases storage. In this article we'll walk you through the setup procedure and cover some basic scenarios on how to use...
Welcome to my very first article on “ iOS Forensics Series” . In this series I will provide information on mobile forensics, starting from the three main categories: seizure, acquisition,...
URLSession has a great feature where you can download files while your app is in the background. In this article we'll go over setting up your app to use this great little feature. We'll focus on...
Welcome to part five of “iOS Application Security Testing Series” You can find the Part 4 here. In this article, I like to go over App Transport Security (ATS) from pen tester’s perspective. What...
Last week we talked about Realm Database and how to get started with it. This week we'll dive in a bit deeper in Realm. Realm has a nice feature called 'Synced Realms'. It's a database that's hosted...
Realm is an alternative to Core Data on iOS and it's also cross-platform. In this blog post we'll setup Realm Database for our little demo project and we'll check out some basic features that you'll...
You might be wondering what are throwable optionals. It's simply an optional that will throw when force unwrapping. Throwable optionals don't exist in the swift standard library. In this blog article...
Welcome to my 4th blog post on “iOS Application Security Testing Series”. You can find Part Three here. In this article, we will look at applications Runtime analysis using Objection runtime Mobile...
TwitterKit offers you loads of functionality: login, sharing, viewing your timeline... In this post we'll learn how to setup your twitter app and start using TwitterKit. We'll cover some basic use...
If you have a free app and you're thinking of ways you can monetize that app one of the most common ways is to put some ads in the app. In this article we'll quickly go over how to set up AdMob and...
We all know how useful a simple print statement can be while you're developing an app. In this quick article we'll quickly go over a logging framework that takes your print statements to the next...
Welcome to my third article on “iOS Application Security Testing Series”. You can find Part Two here. In this article, we will look at applications that use Jailbreak Detection and Certificate...
It might seem strange at first to write an article on functions in swift. But functions in swift are a bit special and have some pretty cool characteristics. Hopefully by the end of this article...
Last year I wrote about cloud based CI systems (nevercode and travis CI). Buddybuild is also one of the cloud based CI. In this post I'll go over setting buddybuild up, and distributing your apps for...
Continuing on our journey with design patterns, this week we'll visit the observer pattern. This is a really simple pattern to implement. We'll quickly go through some theory and get down to...
Welcome to my second article on “iOS Application Security Testing Series”. You can find Part 1 here. Imagine a scenario where you, as an iOS Application Security Tester, are tasked with auditing an...
I get asked so many times to recommend books on iOS development (and development in general). I was a bit surprised at first, but then when I stepped back and thought about it, it made sense. For...
Today widgets are small view controllers that your users can add to their 'Today' view. They are good for displaying the most relevant information to your users. In this article we're going to create...
Abstract factory is one of the creational design patterns. You probably encountered it in your development without realising. Here we'll cover the swift version of the text-book version of the design...
Welcome to my article on “iOS Application Security Testing Series” In this series, I will provide information on iOS Application Security testing, starting from the Setting Up a Testing Environment...
Trying to reproduce a crash your customers are having can be a challenging task. You might spend days trying to figure out what exactly happened that caused the app to crash. I stumbled upon a great...
If you want to share code between your projects but don't want to share it with the public you have an option to create a private cocoapod. A while back I wrote about creating a cocoapod, this...
When I was setting up In-App purchases I never dreamed that I'd be spending so much time setting things up on iTunes Connect. Implementing it in the app was actually quite simple. In this article...
Sometimes it's better to crash then to have your app running in an inconsistent state. In this short article we'll cover the options you have for crashing and what are the main differences between...
Last week we covered some basics on Optionals. This week we'll dive in a bit deeper. We'll take a look at the implementation of the optionals, optional chaining, nil-coalescing operator and a few...
Optionals are one of the major language features of Swift. Understanding what they are and how to use them will be crucial if you want to code in Swift. Hopefully, by the end of this article you'll...
You might have heard that some of the swift native types are being converted from classes to structures. In this article, we'll explore structures and classes, we'll talk about values, references,...
Handoff is a great way for your users to resume an activity on any device. Let's say your users start reading an article on an iPhone, they can easily continue reading it right where they left off on...
You probably found yourself in a situation where you had to do a bunch of asynchronous tasks and you just wanted to get notified when all of them finish. There are two easy ways of doing this:...
If you ever needed to share data between your iOS apps and/or your application targets, there's a very easy way to do this using app groups. In this post we'll see how to share data between two apps...
If you need to know when a file has been modified, renamed, deleted... there's an easy way to do it using dispatch sources. In this post, we'll create a simple library that will notify you when a...
There are more ways than one to do concurrent operations on iOS. In this article, we'll cover how to use Operations and OperationQueue to execute concurrent operations. There's a lot to be said (and...
If you started your iOS development career in Objective-C, especially pre ARC Objective-C, you're probably very familiar with the above-mentioned concepts. If you started with Swift, some of them...
I was poking around GitHub a while back and in the Firefox repo, I saw badge that led me to codecov. This is an awesome little tool for generating code coverage reports. It's simple to use and...
Working on big projects with big code base composed mainly of "legacy code", developer's biggest fear is to introduce something new that might actually break something old. This fear freezes the...
Travis is a cloud-based continuous integration server that works really well. It's quite well-known in the open source community because it's free for open source projects and it integrates perfectly...
If you have an iOS app and you wanted to have push notifications, Firebase offers a simple way to integrate push notifications into your app. And best of all, it's free. In this post, we'll cover...
Firebase is an online database. It's called 'Realtime Database'. But it's much, much more than that. In this post, I'll go through one of my apps and the process of converting it from my REST API to...
NSCache is a great way to cache items like images. What I wanted was to persist the cached items and at the same time have a cache that's really easy to use. I came up with a little class that's...
If you want to display complex layout you could easily spend a week working on one view controller. Fortunately, there's an easier way. You can use a web view to do this. In this article, we'll take...
With iOS 10 we got access to Siri. We got limited access, but still, we can do some cool things with it. In this post, I'll go over the details on how to setup Siri in your app and one example use....
Carthage is a decentralised dependency manager for iOS/OSX. In this post, we'll see how you can declare your project Carthage compatible and how to use Carthage in your projects. Carthage vs...
I'm pretty sure you already know what cocoapods is, but just in case, it's a dependency manager for iOS and OS X. It's a great little thing that makes importing libraries into your projects a breeze....
A few weeks back I wrote an article on dependency injection and how to use it. Here I'll cover how to use dependency injection in your unit tests. Dependency Injection I won't talk a lot about...
We've all heard of continuous integration (CI), and we've been using it for a while now. CI pipeline can be very tedious to setup, luckily there are some cloud based solutions that work really well....
Generics is one powerful feature of swift that allows us to work with generic types. In this article, we'll cover what generics are, and how to use them in your project. Generics You must have come...
Everyone has heard of singletons. It's probably the simplest design pattern there is, yet, there are a few catches when implementing it. In this post, I'll go over the singleton design pattern and...
In this post, we'll cover one very useful technique called dependency injection and we'll look at some examples on to use it in your iOS project. What is it? Dependency Injection is a technique where...
In this article I'll explain how to use map clustering with quad trees using GoogleMaps for iOS. This was done back in December 2015 as back then Google did not have map clustering available for iOS....
In this short blog post, we'll cover some basics on how to use the keychain on iOS, and we'll create a simple wrapper for the keychain. You've probably heard of an iOS keychain. If not, it's a secure...
In one of my previous posts, I talked about how to create a temperature sensor using an Arduino and a BLE breakout circuit, and how to read that data from your iOS app. You can read more about it...
Today we'll create something cool, a temperature sensor and an iOS app that connects to it. For this project, we'll be using an Arduino with a BLE breakout circuit. On the iOS side, we'll be using...
We all hate entering passwords on our devices, you have to remember the right password, type it in... It's a drag. Well, since iPhone 5S we've got a fingerprint sensor, also called Touch ID. We would...
With iPhone 6s came the 3D touch, and with it we got a few more options to interact with the users. In this short blog post we'll examine one of those options called 'Application Shortcuts', or...
You all heard of Siri :) It's an online Voice Command and Text-To-Speech engine. Recently I ran into a great framework for offline voice command and text to speech, and it works great. It's called...
Creating a grayscale image is not a problem in iOS, but I wanted to be able to animate an image view from grayscale to full color. It turned out to be a pretty simple operation, all you have to do is...
Google Maps for iOS can't show all Info Windows (unlike the Android version). But there's an easy way around this limitation. All you have to do is render your Info Window along with your pin icon as...