At Fossil, I’ve had the chance to experiment with Google Drive integration, as a cloud bases storage. The main advantage of using Google Drive is to share with other members easily, with a good web-based UI to modify the contents of folders, and it’s free. However, I struggled when trying to make Google Drive work due to lack of documents and articles related to Google Drive APIs, especially in Swift. Additionally, the code and examples on Google’s sites are out of date. Therefore, I decided to write this article with a hope of saving your time when you want to integrate Google Drive to your apps. Let’s get started.

Last night, I read a chapter of a book as one of my favorite books: "The pragmatic programmer" (By Andrew Hunt and David Thomas). This chapter discusses how to use assertion to make the code easier for debugging. We all know that assertion is an essential tool for writing tests, but It does more than that. Let’s go with me to meet this guy: Assertion.

Submitting your app to the Apple Store isn’t as simple as pressing a “magic” button then it does everything, but it’s not as complicated as you think either. It’s maybe your first time launching your first app, and you don’t have a chance to get familiar with the submitting process before. This step-by-step tutorial will show you the main flow to submit apps from zero to a hero. Kindly note that you need to have a Paid Developer Account to get it done.
Jump in!

Preface

ANCS, stands for Apple Notification Center Service, is designed by Apple. It allows Bluetooth accessories that connect to iOS devices via BLE a simple way to access notifications that happend on iOS devices.

As a Software Engineer, you definitely have heard about the Memory leak concept. Memory leak is a situation where blocks of memory are located by the program remain in the memory despise they are no longer referenced. Leaks waste space by filling up pages of memory with inaccessible data. As a result, the size of memory using in your apps keep increasing, affect the user experiences and the performance of your app. Even worse, your app will be crashed randomly because a process will be terminated by the system if it consumes too much memory.
In this topic, we will discuss how the memory is managed in iOS and how to use the memory efficiently. Read on.

Welcome to the next part of the series of “How to deal with BLE in the background“.
In the previous part, I guided you how to keep your app alive as long as possible when your app enters to background mode by using State Preservation and Restoration technique supported by Apple. However, there are some usecases this technique can not handle, as described below (refer to Apple document: Conditions Under Which Bluetooth State Restoration Will Relaunch An App)

As you can see, there is a common case when users force quit the app from the multiple task view (Whether accidentally or intentionally), the Restoration technique can not awake your app. Let’s imagine that your app has a feature allows users to press a button on your BLE-connected devices to find where their phone is, but if your app is not running or is not able to wake up to handle the BLE signal sent from your devices, this feature would be useless.
In this post, I will show you a technique using iBeacon to deal with this case, which makes your app another chance to wake up despite it is terminated by users. Let’s drive-in!

Preface

When working with CoreBluetooth, have you ever concerned that how the BLE app on iOS can survive when it is terminated by the system? How can we bring it back to the background? Is there anything like a service on Android that can last forever? You can find the answer to all these questions in this post. Read on!

As you might know, the word “Thread safe” is referred to a computer science concept in the context of multi-thread programs. A code is called “Thread safe” if any shared data is accessed by only one thread at any given time. Notice these shared data are called critical sections in an operating system.
The point is Swift collection types like Array and Dictionary are not thread-safe when declared mutable (With var keyword).
In this post, we will discuss some techniques to make our code thread safe in iOS.