Blog
The Latest from Our Team
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Basics
This post is intended to give you a swift kick from behind into a pool of CORS, without taking all day to do so, and without digging into any specific technologies. With that said, let’s learn to swim. What is CORS? From Mozilla: “Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an HTTP-header based mechanism that allows…
Read more…
Contact Integration for Your Swift App
iOS and Mac have built-in systems to house many things, such as contacts. If you are building software that has contacts, there is a good chance you will want to pull those system contacts and integrate them into your system. So how does one go about integrating those contacts? The code to do so isn’t…
Read more…
RBAC vs ABAC
Most modern systems have some form of authentication and authorization. Authentication refers to figuring out who someone is (think of user login). Authorization refers to figuring out what a user can do within a system. Just because a user can log in does not mean they can do anything inside a system. In many systems,…
Read more…
More SQLite and Swift
In my previous blog post, I mentioned using SQLite with an iOS application. In this post, we will extend that example to support text searching. While SQLite is a single file database that is pretty straightforward to work, it contains a powerful full-text search feature. To use this full-text feature of SQLite, you will need…
Read more…
SQLite and Swift
When building an application, you often need some way to store associated data. Applications usually store less data than cloud applications, but many of the same constraints still exist. You still need to store data. Some of the data is relational, such as contacts or addresses. And having the ability to store relational data in…
Read more…
Azure Communication Services
Sending SMS (text messages) is pretty straightforward. I have previously written blog posts on how to do this with Twilio and AWS SNS. Now Azure has a service that can send SMS messages without using another service. To start, create an Azure Communication Service. Once your Communication Service is created, you need to get a…
Read more…
How to Copy VS Code Configs to a Different Machine
I work with many students through our various education programs and Nebraska Dev Lab. During the last few days, I have done a lot of code walkthroughs, basically showing students how to implement a feature one line of code at a time. When we got to the frontend buildout, I started using Visual Studio Code….
Read more…
Safari Push Notifications?
At Don’t Panic Labs, we have built many iOS and Android applications over the years. Many of them have been built using some sort of cross-platform technology, like Ionic. But why so many mobile applications? Not one reason, many reasons. Sometimes customers want to be in the Apple and Google app stores. Sometimes they want…
Read more…
Twilio Verify
The Twilio Verify API allows us to verify users while not requiring them to enter (or remember) a password. This is a huge benefit for many systems. Having fewer passwords is better. Twilio Verify is extremely easy to set up. First, you must have a Twilio account. This is pretty straightforward. Once you have an…
Read more…
Things You Will Probably Learn in the First Year of Being a Developer
You will learn a lot during your first year as a software developer. But the biggest surprise may be how vital communication is to the success of software projects. Many of the things learned during the first year boil down to communication. Project management, task management, standups, iteration planning, and retros are all really about…
Read more…