Swift

Have your ever wondered how to take advantage of the cryptographic interfaces that Apple provides for you, but just unsure where to start?  If you so, then this tutorial will provide you a brief overview on how to implement the CommonCrypto APIs into your iOS or macOS application utilizing Swift 5.  In this tutorial I will cover taking a clear text Swift string and creating a MD5 and SHA-256 hashed value from this string.  Before we dive into the code though, let's talk about why you might want to use these hashing functions in your application.  One reason would be to persist sensitive inf

With daylight savings time being a few days old now for 2019 I thought I would put together a small tutorial on how to convert dates by timezone in Swift.  There are two approaches that I generally use when converting dates, the first is to use a Foundation's DateFormatter, and the second is to perform an Epoch calculation based upon your current timezone offset.  The advantage of using the DateFormatter approach is that dates can easily be displayed or evaluat

One topic that I have seen come up a lot over the last couple of years is how to detect internet connectivity in an iOS or macOS application.  This is a topic that really interests me so I thought I would take some time and write a tutorial on how I and Apple recommend that client applications determine network connectivity.  To start, I thought I would provide some context on where this network connectivity model might be applicable.  The main use case is in a traditional client to server communication setting where a client is sending either a GET or POST request to a server, and the serv

In mid-December of 2017 a proposal went into review for the Swift language entitled, “SE-0192 – Non-Exhaustive Enums.”  In this proposal the Swift core team outlined a change to allow switch statements that consume enum types to be non-exhaustive or exhaustive, depending upon their needs.   The motivation behind this change was to allow for the easier additions to C based Enums in Apple or third party libraries without creating source breaking changes in projects downstream.

Writing unit testing is a cornerstone of software development.  When developing mobile or desktop applications, unit testing becomes even more critical, as there is often vital business logic that needs to be validated.  Have you ever found yourself wondering; what makes a great unit test in Swift? What key components give my application enough testing coverage to make sure that everything works and nothing regresses when new code is added to my project?  If you have asked yourself these questions then you are not alone.  In fact, that is why I wanted to write this tutorial.