Mild Mannered Maverick

I had the incredible opportunity to be featured on the Best Business Coach Podcast with Daryl Urbanski. In this conversation, we delved into a journey of becoming a software engineer, launching digital products, and how one gets started on programming. It was an honor to share my perspective alongside such an esteemed company and dive into strategies for crafting innovative solutions and avoiding…

In both software architecture and physical architecture, design patterns are solutions to common problems, allowing architects to leverage the industry’s experience to the problem, and provide a collective concordance to construct the solution. In software engineering, design patterns helps to design scalable and maintainable systems. One is the “Blast Door” design pattern. Though its name might…

The App Store review team has a tendency to reject apps not leveraging native platform features. Hence, a native application would need to earn its place in the App Store by going above and beyond what a Progressive Web Application (PWA) can provide. Conversely, even though web applications are write once, run anywhere, iOS and macOS have a number of platform features not available to them. Thus,…

Both macOS and iOS applications use Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs) to identify data types that can be shared. UTIs serve as a way for different applications to communicate what data types they can understand, allowing efficient and accurate transfer of information. In this article, we will explore what UTIs are and how they are used in iOS and macOS applications. We provide a step-by-step guide…

How to Get Started with FMDB using Swift

My latest guest post for Waldo shows you how to use SQLite databases using Swift through Gus Muller’s FMDB library.   Head to Waldo for the article: Getting Started with FMDB and Swift: A Guide.  

SwiftUI vs. Storyboard: Which Is the Best?

If you’re still deciding whether to use storyboards or plunge into SwiftUI, skim through my latest guest post at Waldo comparing the two. You’ll know which one is better and in what situations to choose one over the other.

How to Create an App ID

Check out my latest guest post at Waldo: How to Create an iOS App ID: 2 Quick and Easy Methods. You will learn: What an App ID is in Apple’s ecosystems. How to create App IDs. What is an App Store ID and how it relates to an App ID. How to find an App ID for an existing app. How to find an App Store ID for an existing app. Waldo helps you create and maintain automated tests for iOS and Android…

Is that App Safe to Open?

If you try to open a freshly downloaded app and then blocked by the “<app> cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified. macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware” dialog, it just means what it says. The operating system is rather suspicious that the app may be malicious software. Thereupon it advises you to not run it. Even if you trust the developer of this app, the…

How to Configure Developer ID Signing in Xcode Bot

Apple’s Notary Service only accepts binaries signed with the Developer ID certificate. Correspondingly this certificate has direct links to a legal entity or a natural person, forcing them to vouch for the signed binary. In a sense this linkage supplies some security to users as virtually nobody can distribute apps anonymously any longer. Accordingly Developer ID signed binaries carries the…

Introducing macOS Notarization Automation Book

“I’ve just notarize an app with Xcode organizer UI. As a next step I want to do it in [a] CI process. How to do it?” “Is there instruction on how to best integrate [notarization] into a CI build process?” “How can I get this [notarization tool output] from the command line so the build script can deal with the result?” Are those questions sound familiar to you? If yes, you’ve come to the right…

What’s New with Xcode 13 Notarization

WWDC 2021 has ended. Now it’s time to look at all those developer tools Apple delivered and see how it can improve our work as software engineers. One notable change for macOS developers is a new notarization tool called notarytool. For one, the new tool promises faster uploads thanks to S3 transport optimizations. To clarify, the it would upload the binary to one of Amazon Web Services’ many…

What can be Notarized for Developer ID Distribution?

“It’s not clear what can be notarized” When you’re new to distributing macOS apps outside the store, the topic of notarization may be foreign to you. Put simply, notarization is about registering your binary to Apple. Unlike uploading for App Store, the process is entirely automatic on Apple’s end – there is no human reviewer to approve or reject your application. Apple would then scan your…

How to Securely Provide Apple ID Password into Notarization Build Jobs

Notarization is now mandatory to distribute macOS applications, plug-ins, and drivers outside the Mac App Store. You would need to present your binary package to Apple for automated registration. If it turns out that the package contains malware, Apple can prevent all macOS computers to run it. In other words, it’s a kind of centralized malware scanning. The notarization process usually takes a…

How to Transfer Applications for App Store Small Business Program Members

The App Store Small Business Program lowers the commission rate that Apple Developer Program (ADP) members need to pay Apple for sales on apps and in-app purchases. However the program would be available only to members earning less than one million dollars (US) per year and do not participate in app transfers. Doing any of those two would automatically expel the member from the program. “But I…

Family Sharing is Supported for All In-App Purchases

Basil Salad Software is opting in to support family sharing of all its current in-app purchases. Applications bought from the Apple App Stores having non-consumable in-app purchases is shareable in the family sharing group.

The following are currently available applications and their corresponding in-app purchases:

Bigger Picture (macOS) – Super Resolution.

Speech Timer for macOS– Custom Speech…

How to Run Legacy Command Line Apps on Apple Silicon

The new M1 “Apple Silicon” Macs are indeed faster than others in their respective classes. They also outperformed a number of higher-classed Mac released just one year ago.

However if you’re depending on command-line applications, things aren’t so pretty. Notably open-source ones. Gnu’s Compiler Collection is yet to support ARM64 on the Mac. Which is impeding support for many numerical libraries…