Michael Brown

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. »

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. »

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! »

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. »

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. »