Using Packages to create an installer for distributing macOS apps outside of the Mac App Store
macOS developers will most likely be faced with the requirement to build an installer for apps they want to — or must — distribute outside of the Mac App Store (MAS). There is also substantial economic incentive to...
Beyond App Sandbox: Going outside of the macOS app container
Did you know that a macOS app can read and write outside of its container when sandboxed? Did you know that a non-sandboxed macOS app has no container? Were you aware that you can sell and distribute non-sandboxed macOS apps...
Beyond the Sandbox: Signing and distributing macOS apps outside of the Mac App Store
Since the advent of OS X Mojave and especially Catalina and the requirement for app notarization, some of us old-time macOS developers are concerned that Apple will pull the plug on the apps that we distribute ourselves. Many of...
Using App Groups for communication between macOS/iOS apps from the Same Vendor
Apple’s “app group” technology allows a collection of macOS (or iOS) apps from the same development team, developer, vendor, etc., to all communicate with each other, coordinate functionality, share resources,...
How to Use Git Pull Requests to Improve Code Quality and Developer Participation
Today, we’ll talk about a feature of several well-known Git tools that I prefer to call a “merge request,” but tends often to be referred to as a “pull request,” for example, on sites like GitHub and...
How to Use Xcode Instrument to Optimize Your Swift Code
I still run across curmudgeons who flat out reject techniques like object-oriented programming (especially inheritance and polymorphism), protocols and protocol-oriented programming (especially composition), generics, and...
Dividing and Conquering Your Xcode Projects with Targets
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to leverage Xcode targets to control the massive complexity involved in building iOS (and macOS, watchOS, and tvOS) apps. A lot of time can be saved when developers realize that not...
Best Practices for Building Swift Classes
In this tutorial, I’m going to give you some best practices that will help you safely and effectively use classes (reference types) and reference semantics in Swift. Protocol-oriented programming (POP) and value semantics...
Protocol-oriented Data Structures in Swift: A Generic Doubly Linked List
Let’s talk about creating a list on steroids, i.e., a generic doubly linked list in Swift. For our purposes here, a list is a software receptacle that contains related data that we’re interested in inspecting,...
Design Patterns in Swift #3: Facade and Adapter
This tutorial is the third installment in our series on design patterns. I started this series with a tutorial examining two examples of patterns in the “creational” category: factory method and singleton. I then...