Objective-C Blocks are very powerful but often under-used or badly abused! Continuing on from my previous post on how to declare a block, here is a quick-fire list of 5 experience-earned tips that every developer should know.
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C
There are 6 posts tagged C (this is page 1 of 2).
How to declare a block
Are you really sure on how to declare a block? How about all 4 variations? On iOS and macOS, it can be easy to forget Objective-C block syntax as it isn’t the most intuitive, especially now Swift is becoming the main language of new projects. Remembering the syntax is actually just a short click away but here are easy-to-read example uses with nullability tips and things to watch out for when declaring a block.
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Encrypt data using AES and 256-bit keys
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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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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How to build a Ghostbuster Proton Pack
I decided to go as a Ghostbuster for a fancy dress party recently. Of course all Ghostbusters need fully working Ghostbuster proton packs complete with animated LED displays and electroluminescent glowing wires, so here are the details on how I built mine. It took about 3 or 4 evenings to build and involved Arduinos, lots of hot glue and over 92 LEDs! It is just a shame I missed out on the best fancy dress award that night because it looked ‘too realistic’!
The Ghostbusters proton pack lit up in the dark