Senior iOS Developer at Snowdog
In WWDC 2020, one new iOS14 feature shone brighter than the rest: App Clips. With App Clips on their hands, users will have an opportunity to save time, interacting with certain app functions faster. Let’s take a closer look at how this feature works and what advantages businesses can get using this tool.
Over the past few years — Apple has made huge improvements in the field of Machine Learning and Cameras both on the hardware and software end. We’ve noticed more Apple devices come with a dedicated neural engine, a special processor that makes machine learning models really fast. There were quite a few interesting announcements during WWDC 2020. The introduction of iOS 14 brought in a slew of enhancements and interesting new features in Apple’s computer Vision framework. Vision framework was released in 2017 to allow developers to leverage complex computer vision algorithms with ease. In iOS 14, Apple has focused many of its efforts on increasing the depth of its Vision framework. One of those is the new capability of hand tracking and improved body pose estimation for images and videos. Apart from hand & body tracking, the update comes with other interesting features
If you’ve ever built an iOS app, you’ve probably come across a situation where you need to store sensitive information on behalf of the user. For this, Apple’s Keychain Services is your guy because it’s great for securing sensitive data. UserDefaults are enough when you’re dealing with preferences, but you should never store credentials in them. Keychain is not limited to passwords; you can store any personal data, such as credit card information or even short notes. Keychain can also keep items that the user needs but may not be aware of, for example cryptographic keys and certificates that you manage. Keep in mind that Keychain is stored in a secure enclave in the A7 chip or newer. There are many wrappers out there that allow you to use Keychain, but I want to show that you can also do it yourself quite easily.
If you’ve ever built an iOS app, you’ve probably come across a situation where you need to store sensitive information on behalf of the user. For this, Apple’s Keychain Services is your guy; it’s good for saving secure data. UserDefaults are fine, when you’re dealing with preferences, but you should never store credentials in them. The keychain is not limited to passwords. You can store other secrets that the user explicitly cares about, such as credit card information or even short notes. You can also store items that the user needs but may not be aware of, for example, the cryptographic keys and certificates that you manage. You can use the keychain to store these items as well. Keep in mind that Keychain is stored in a secure enclave in the A7 or newest chips. There are many wrappers where you can easily use Keychain, but I want to show that Keychain is not difficult and we can use it as well.
Our SNOWDOG iOS team travelled to Kraków to attend Mobiconf, a fantastic international mobile conference that brings together the community of iOS/Android and Java developers, UI/UX designers, software testers, project managers, product owners and CTOs. A special highlight of the trip was the opportunity for us to meet up with Majid in person, who works with the team remotely from Azerbaijan!