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The Latest from Our Team
Pulling Calendar Items Using Swift
In a previous blog post, I took you through how to pull contacts from iOS or Mac. In this post, I will show you how to pull calendar items. This turns out to be very similar to pulling contacts. First, we must request access to the calendar. As part of requesting access, we must create…
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Scaffolding
Sometimes we just need a few screens to perform some basic data editing. Often this is necessary for an admin system. We could build full systems for that (which has some advantages), but we might be better off with some scaffolded UI. In software development, scaffolding is when some pre-generated code is used to get…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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….
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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…
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