https://michael-brown.net/ Recent content on Michael Brown Hugo -- gohugo.io Copyright © 2016 Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2021/the-future-of-the-reactiveswift-composable-architecture/ Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2021/the-future-of-the-reactiveswift-composable-architecture/ Introduction The ReactiveSwift Composable Architecture is a fork of the Point-Free Composable Architecture. It uses ReactiveSwift as the basis for the Effect type instead of Apple’s Combine framework. The reason why I created the fork, in May 2020, was because Combine is only available on iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 and later. At the time I was working on a brand new iOS app where I really wanted to use TCA but we couldn’t yet set a minimum deployment target of iOS 13. https://michael-brown.net/2021/xcode-12-tabs/ Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2021/xcode-12-tabs/ Up until Xcode 12 was released, Xcode tabs were a pretty terrible user experience, especially if you also regularly used an actually good code editor like Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code and knew what a good tabs UX was like. In Xcode tabs you could open the same file in 2 (or more) different tabs, for instance, which is close to useless. Xcode tabs worked pretty much like document tabs in any other application. https://michael-brown.net/2018/touch-id-and-face-id-on-ios/ Sat, 05 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2018/touch-id-and-face-id-on-ios/ Introduction Adding support for Touch ID and Face ID to your app is not always completely straightforward, especially given that the documentation from Apple on the APIs is somewhat sparse and in some cases incorrect. I recently added Face ID and Touch ID support to my company’s app and I thought it would be helpful to document what I found. There is only a single class, LAContext in the LocalAuthentication framework, so it’s surprising how complex it can get. https://michael-brown.net/2017/swift-and-kvo-context-variables/ Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2017/swift-and-kvo-context-variables/ I came across a crash in my app Memories when using the iOS 11 betas. It happened reliably every time I loaded a video, and the video code uses KVO, as AVFoundation requires you to use it for a lot of things. When I ran the app in Xcode this was the exception that was causing the crash: Simultaneous accesses to 0x1c41ded68, but modification requires exclusive access. Previous access (a modification) started at addObserver(_:forKeyPath:options:context:) Current access (a modification) started at observeValue(forKeyPath:of:change:context:) The hex address was the address of the property I was using as the context passed to addObserver() and which I was checking in observeValue. https://michael-brown.net/2016/using-phlivephotoview-with-auto-layout/ Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2016/using-phlivephotoview-with-auto-layout/ So, I was working on updating my app Memories to support displaying Live Photos properly and not just as a static image. I took a look at the documentation for PHLivePhotoView and thought that this would be fairly straightforward. For Live Photos, I’ll just use a PHLivePhotoView instead of a UIImageView. Well, as is usually the case when a developer says: “this looks straightforward, I’ll have it done in a couple of hours”, it was not quite so straightforward and had me scratching my head and cursing until 2am until I finally realised what I was doing wrong. https://michael-brown.net/2016/podcast-sponsorship-an-experiment/ Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2016/podcast-sponsorship-an-experiment/ I’m an iOS developer in my spare time. You know, on evenings, and weekends. I recently launched an app called Memories. I created the app mainly because it was an app that I wanted to have. I thought that if I wanted to use an app like this (and I use it every day), then maybe other people would like an app like that too. The app replicates a feature found in cloud photo services like Everpix (RIP) and Picturelife that shows you all the photos you took on a certain date (usually today) in previous years. https://michael-brown.net/2016/comparing-dates-whilst-ignoring-the-time/ Sun, 24 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2016/comparing-dates-whilst-ignoring-the-time/ Comparing dates is one of the most common things you have to do as a developer of almost any type of software. At first glance it would seem to be something almost trivially easy. What could possibly go wrong? Well, turns out, quite a lot! I’m going to highlight just one issue that recently caused an embarassing bug in my app Memories. It involved just a simple date comparison, ignoring time, and without crossing timezones. https://michael-brown.net/2016/using-stride-to-convert-c-style-for-loops-to-swift-2.2/ Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2016/using-stride-to-convert-c-style-for-loops-to-swift-2.2/ With the release of Swift 2.2 in Xcode 7.3 C-style for loops have become deprecated. The default Xcode fix-it for converting them uses a Range: let count = 5 for var index = 0; index < count; index++ { doSomething(index) } is converted do: let count = 5 for index in 0 ..< count { doSomething(index) } For the vast majority of C-style for loops this will work perfectly well. But there are cases where using a Range not only won’t work as expected but will actually crash! https://michael-brown.net/2016/apple-vs-the-fbi/ Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2016/apple-vs-the-fbi/ The details of this case have been broken down and explained extremely well by Ben Thompson. The more technical details have also been very thoroughly covered by Jonathan Zdziarski on his blog. I am clearly on Apple’s side in this battle, and very much hope that they don’t lose. However, it’s worth pointing out that if they were to lose, that is, if they were compelled to provide a mechanism to facilitate brute force pass code cracking it wouldn’t be a total disaster. https://michael-brown.net/about/ Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/about/ My name is Michael Brown. I’m a software developer living in Lisbon, Portugal. I write apps for iOS. https://michael-brown.net/apps/ Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/apps/ iOS Apps I’ve developed available in the App Store: Memories - Photos taken On This Day Discontinued apps: Farmácias de Serviço ThenDo - Easy, Beautiful Lists Interest : Loan Calculator For questions or support about these apps you can e-mail me at this domain. https://michael-brown.net/2016/starting-over/ Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://michael-brown.net/2016/starting-over/ My old tumblr blog was a mess. I was doing a very bad impression of being an Apple blogger, interspersed with the odd post about iOS development. The posts were too long and too infrequent. It was actually starting to be an embarrassment. So I killed it. All the old posts are gone. I’m starting over, with a new blog using the Hugo static blogging engine and hosting everything on GitHub Pages.