In this post I will walk you through some of the complexities of developing for Bluetooth on iOS, starting with the core concepts, then moving onto my experiences building a real-world application....
I just spent a couple of days at the YOW! Connected conference and had a great time, despite nursing a bit of a cold. There were a tonne of great talks at the conference covering a wide range of topics, but in this post I'm going to briefly reflect on one specific trend that interested me at the event: the way in which UI platforms are advancing to adopt modern languages, and are even influencing each other in the process. The end-result: they're all moving towards languages that are both functional and statically typed.
Full disclosure: This year I was a member of the programme committee for the conference. So in writing this post, there's a bit of a risk that I'm creating an echo chamber for myself. All I can really say in my defence is that I hadn't consciously made these connections in advance - it was only afterwards that I saw a trend!
In June 2015, Apple announced at WWDC that they were open-sourcing the Swift language and its runtime libraries. On December 3rd that year they made good on their promise. In this post I'd like to talk about why this is significant, particularly for server-side developers.Shine is super proud to announce that senior consultant Ben Teese (@benteese) will be speaking at the YOW! Conference being held in Melbourne on the 3rd and 4th of December 2015.Ben will actually be co-presenting this one with Sam Ritchie (@FakeSamRitchie), an iOS developer from Perth. Sam will be talking about ReactiveCocoa,...
Last week I had the privilege of attending the YOW! Connected conference in Melbourne, Australia. YOW! Connected offers a look at all the interesting things that are happening in the mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) space, from the perspective of both software developers and UX designers.On the mobile front it included a variety of talks relating to both the iOS and Android platforms and yes, even a little bit of Windows.In general all the talks that I went to were pretty good, but here I will write about a few that particularly interested me.
Passwords have become such a pain in the neck. Switching between different apps and websites you will usually find different password security policies. One site will inform you no more than 10 characters, other a 6 digits pin. While some other sites will insist in making you change your password every 15 days, and so on.Why does this have to be so complicated, and hard to manage? Wouldn't it be so much easier to use something that you have as a key instead of having to remember so many different passwords across a plethora of different sites!?Well, there is something that most of us have. Something we were born with. Something we use every single day. That is our fingerprint. Each fingerprint has a unique pattern that can be used as key. In this blog post, I'll talk about my experience of playing around with Apple's Touch ID.
After the most recent WWDC, most iOS developers aren't talking about cool new iOS 8 features or APIs. Instead, they're talking about a whole new language: Swift. Yes, you heard right - a whole new programming language. How exciting it is!
Apple has been working on Swift secretly for a few years. It is a modern programming language that takes the strengths of other popular languages (for example, Python) and avoids the bad things about Objective-C (for example, poor manual memory-management and awful block syntax). As Apple declared, it’s Objective-C without the C. Not only this, Swift is also able to access the Apple Cocoa Touch framework and share the same LLVM compiler as Objective-C, so they can be seamlessly mixed in a same project.
Now you might be just like me, wondering why Apple would introduce a new language for iOS and Mac OS programming. Let’s walk through some most exciting parts of Swift to see if we can find a reason.