by Steven Huey
In iOS 9 and macOS 10.11 Apple introduced the libcompression APIs to provide a more standard way of compressing and decompressing data in your apps while offering a selection of algorithms with tradeoffs between compression efficiency, time, and energy requirements. In the past I’ve used third party APIs to compress or decompress ZIP archives given the popularity of the format, but hadn’t considered using other algorithms to either benefit from better compression or energy efficiency. Given that, I decided to take a look at the algorithms offered by libcompression and see how they compare.
by Steven Huey
In the first part of this series of posts about Core Spotlight we looked at how to use the Core Spotlight APIs to index application data, how to search that data using Spotlight, and how to respond when a user selects a search result for your application’s data. In this post we’ll take a look at how easy it can be to search that same index from within your app.
by Steven Huey
Core Spotlight has been available since iOS 9 but Apple has made some updates in iOS 10 that make it worth another look. In this series of posts I’ll look at how you can use Core Spotlight to index your application data and search that data both from within iOS using Spotlight and from within an app using some of the new Core Spotlight APIs such as CSSearchQuery.
by Steven Huey
At WWDC this year Apple engineers gave a talk about their new Unified Logging and Activity Tracing APIs which is definitely worth checking out. I know logging isn’t exactly going to steal the headlines away from Siri integration or watchOS 3, but as a developer it’s a valuable debugging tool and the changes in these APIs look to save some significant time while debugging crashes and squashing bugs.
by Steven Huey
A few months ago I stumbled across across an interesting open source project created by Katrina Owen called exercism.io that provides a collection of programming practice problems in over 30 languages. On the surface, it’s a great resource for learning to code or learning a new language. I’ve found however that as you dig deeper it has much more to offer on a number of levels.
