development
Tips On Small-Screen Development
Most of the development team here at BiTE are very well supplied with screen real estate; in fact, I can’t believe how wide and how numerous their monitors are. Very often, someone shares their screen with me, and it’s so insanely wide that it’s almost impossible to see it on my screen, because it has …
Diffable Data Sources and Data Storage — Part 1
When I first started programming iOS (back in iOS 3.2), many of my apps revolved around table views (UITableView). At first, I was surprised by how Apple makes you supply the data to a table view. You don’t just store all the data in the table view. Instead, there’s a separate object, the data source …
Tricks for Testing External Links
On iOS, there is no deep mechanism for interapplication communication such as macOS provides through Apple events. Your app is sandboxed; other apps cannot drive it. There is, however, a simple and safe mechanism for letting another app send small messages to your app, namely through external links. We are all familiar with links. Suppose …
What Quibi Shutting Down Means for Streaming Apps
I mean, we knew it enough to mock it. Twice. But the point is, we won’t be getting to know it any better, because it is shutting down a mere six months after launch. In a Medium post, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman said, “we feel that we’ve exhausted all our options. As a result …
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Swift 5.2: No More Unsafe Pointer References
When people upgraded to Xcode 11.4, a lot of complaints started to appear on StackOverflow that code of the following form was giving trouble (this is an odd way to write this, but just bear with me): let color = // some UIColor var r = 0 as CGFloat var g = 0 as CGFloat …
What I Look for When Refactoring
The Backstory My current assignment is working on a rather large app that had a huge summer push that involved scaling the team up to several developers per platform and the addition of a handful of third-party libraries. As anyone who has worked in iOS development will tell you, the App Delegate is often the …
Help Wanted, Help Offered
Hackathon Last week we talked about the amazing response from the tech sector to the coronavirus — how 3D printers, app developers, and content creators are devoting their time to helping others during this unprecedented crisis. This week we’ll tell you how you can help. Thursday Devpost announced the global COVID-19 online hackathon, open to all …
Happy Path Democracy
Unless you’ve completely sworn off politics (honestly, we wouldn’t blame you), you’ll have heard by now about the disastrous failure of the app hired to report results of the Iowa Democratic caucus. Precinct chairs were supposed to enter primary election results into the app, but many had trouble getting it to work, partly because they …
