AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard and is an industry-standard algorithm for encrypting data symmetrically which even the US government has approved for SECRET documents. If you don’t know what symmetrical encryption is, it means that you use the same key or password to encrypt the data as you do to unencrypt it. So you need to keep the key extremely secret however it’s still incredibly useful. I’ll show you how to use openssl to encrypt some data and decrypt it using the Common Crypto libraries on iOS.
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Objective-C
There are 9 posts filed in Objective-C (this is page 1 of 2).
Quick way of cleaning HTML for iOS apps
For some reason HTML is always dirty, it’s usually full of Analytics tags, JavaScript or contains nested HTML tags. This is usually fine for displaying in browsers but at some point an iOS app will need to display HTML content and usually when it does, you need it to display clean HTML or only a small subset of HTML tags… all it takes is an unexpected tag and the whole document layout could be ruined. So here is a way of quickly and easily stripping HTML content down.
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5 Time-saving Objective-C tips every developer should know
Here’s a quick fire list of 5 time-saving Objective-C tips that every developer should know. Perfect for making time for that extra coffee!
1. Enum shorthand
Enums at their simplest are labelled sets of integers. Where an inexperienced programmer might use a number to represent the download state of an image lets say, e.g. 0 = queued, 1 = downloading, 2 = downloaded, 3 = complete… When using these numbers in actual code a simple slip of the finger on the keyboard and they could easily type an extra digit in their if statement or assignment. These types of errors don’t usually show up when compiling. Even worse, these are usually obscure errors that only reveal themselves at run-time and only then when things don’t work as expected often requiring considerable debugging effort.
This is where enums step in. Enums are really handy and allow you to associate symbols or ‘labels’ with integers. If you type an enum value that doesn’t exist the compiler steps in and reports an error at compile-time instead and Xcode will probably suggest a fix for you if it was a typo! The other benefit of enums is that you can quickly add new values into them and assuming your code doesn’t save the integer to disk your code will automatically work with the new values.
There are a couple of different ways to define enums but the easiest way which will also provide Xcode with some extra compiling hints is as follows:
Core Animation stops animation on app relaunch
On one of my projects I discovered a bug in a never-ending animation I had set up. Whenever the app was suspended (such as when you multitask and open another app), on relaunching the app the animation was frozen. After some investigating, I discovered that with Core Animation you need to set a flag on the CABasicAnimation class called removedOnCompletion to NO otherwise the animation will get cleaned up when it gets suspended.
Objective-C:
CABasicAnimation *dartWiggleAnimation = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"position"];
dartWiggleAnimation.fromValue =
[NSValue valueWithCGPoint:CGPointMake(self.center.x-DART_WIGGLE_HALF, self.center.y+DART_CENTER_H_OFFSET)];
dartWiggleAnimation.toValue =
[NSValue valueWithCGPoint:CGPointMake(self.center.x+DART_WIGGLE_HALF, self.center.y+DART_CENTER_H_OFFSET)];
dartWiggleAnimation.timingFunction =
[CAMediaTimingFunction functionWithName: kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut];
dartWiggleAnimation.duration = 0.4;
dartWiggleAnimation.repeatCount = HUGE_VALF;
dartWiggleAnimation.autoreverses = YES;
dartWiggleAnimation.removedOnCompletion = NO;
[[nextDart layer] addAnimation:dartWiggleAnimation forKey:@"dartWiggle"];Swift:
let dartWiggleAnimation = CABasicAnimation(keyPath: #keyPath(CALayer.position))
dartWiggleAnimation.fromValue = CGPoint(x: self.center.x - DART_WIGGLE_HALF, y: self.center.y + DART_CENTER_H_OFFSET)
dartWiggleAnimation.toValue = CGPoint(x: self.center.x + DART_WIGGLE_HALF, y: self.center.y + DART_CENTER_H_OFFSET)
dartWiggleAnimation.timingFunction = CAMediaTimingFunction(name: CAMediaTimingFunctionName.easeInEaseOut)
dartWiggleAnimation.duration = 0.4
dartWiggleAnimation.repeatCount = Float.greatestFiniteMagnitude
dartWiggleAnimation.autoreverses = true
dartWiggleAnimation.isRemovedOnCompletion = false
nextDart.layer.add(dartWiggleAnimation, forKey: "dartWiggle")
Does this seem like a bug or a feature?
Calculating UNIX file permissions
A few years ago I wrote a simple but handy Mac app that calculates unix file permissions using a matrix of check boxes. I wrote it because I wanted to better understand how those octal values get calculated and to expand my experience of writing Mac apps.
I was also learning some crazy assembly code at the time too so I was also making sense of putting bitwise operations to task. Rather than let this code languish on my hard drive, I thought I’d share…
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