When your iOS (or macOS) app needs to read data from a nearby Bluetooth device – how do you decode the data included in the BLE characteristics? At QuickBird Medical, we often work with medical devices. Our apps need to safely read health data from those devices via BLE, so we’ve had our fair share […]
Search is a crucial feature for many apps. Flutter already offers some search bar widgets to go with, but as soon as you want to use designs for platforms other than Material (like Cupertino), you run into problems. So what’s the best way to implement a platform-adaptive search widget in Flutter? You’ve come to the […]
“What’s your favorite birthday present?” – This question only makes sense if you received at least one present. Otherwise, you might even perceive it as offensive. So before asking this question, we should better make sure that your list of received presents is non-empty! But let’s start from the beginning… Surprises aren’t always nice… 🎁 As […]
Large, complex apps rely on a robust, yet flexible app architecture. In this article, we’ll show you how to accomplish this goal and how to handle navigation and deep-linking with SwiftUI. With more and more people building production apps in SwiftUI, we recently started a pursuit to try out, discuss and compare different app architectures. […]
When working with any communication or storage medium such as Bluetooth, wi-fi (and even wired networks) or disk storage, data can get corrupted. In such cases, we need to make sure that the data we receive (or read) is the same data that was sent (or written). We need a mechanism to validate the integrity […]
When developing iOS apps with UIKit, many developers have used the Coordinator pattern to abstract away the connections between individual view components. This increases the reusability of view components (such as view controllers), reduces responsibilities of the frequently overcrowded UIViewController implementations and makes connections, such as transitions and data exchange, between view components more visible. […]
It’s rare that you juggle with bits and bytes in Swift because of its neat static type system. Most of the time, you don’t care what’s under the hood – you just work with classes, structs, and enums or primitive types like Int, Float or String. But sooner or later, almost every Swift developer gets […]
When working with any communication or storage medium such as Bluetooth, wi-fi (and even wired networks) or disk storage, data can get corrupted. In such cases, we need to make sure that the data we receive (or read) is the same data that was sent (or written). We need a mechanism to validate the integrity […]
The cool thing about programming is that there is an absolute truth in every Bit: It’s either black or white, 1 or 0, true or false. In theory. But whenever you transmit data or store it somewhere on a physical drive, it can get corrupted. Individual bits can get flipped or even bursts of multiple […]
In this article, we’re going to build some MVI View Models on Android and explore how we can test them efficiently.
We love Swift as a lean and intuitive programming language and recently, SwiftUI made our hearts beat faster for providing us with great tools to create amazing user experiences with very little, simple code. But with the introduction of property wrappers, a lot of @-signs, $-signs and underscores suddenly popped up. Didn’t it just get […]
What do you prefer: creating user interfaces visually or in code? This question has split the Apple developer community for years. Could this year’s WWDC finally mark the end of that? Last year, Apple made a huge step forward in UI development with the introduction of SwiftUI: For the first time, the visual approach and […]
MVI is a common architecture pattern to design your Android apps. There are lots of articles out there about MVI but most of them use RxJava. In this article we instead use Kotlin Coroutines & the Kotlin Flow API to implement an MVI architecture. As a part of this, we specifically explore the new StateFlow […]
Facing the Corona virus, many companies around the globe need to switch to remote work right now. While this is required by law in some places, we see it as our social obligation towards society. Doing home office for a couple of weeks or months won’t kill us – but if we refrain from doing […]
“Your code sucks!” – It’s usually not what the reviewer said, but that’s how we perceive it sometimes when our code is being reviewed. We feel challenged or even provoked. Our pride is at stake! So we either begin lengthy discussions to defend ourselves or we blindly adapt the code for the sake of friendship and […]
In this article, we focus on iOS App Security and show you concrete techniques on how to improve security in your iOS apps.
In this article, we collected best practices to keep your users’ data secure in Android Apps. We are going to talk about how you can implement mobile app security for storing data, communicate between client and server and other aspects like logging and analytics.
Mobile apps often deal with really private and sensitive user data like personal health information or banking information. Losing data or getting hacked, therefore, can have huge consequences. There is no bigger nightmare for any app developer than knowing that his application was involved in a huge data leak scandal and user data was stolen. […]
With SwiftUI and Xcode 11 released just recently, we decided to investigate different app architectures that can be used with SwiftUI. We’re going to look into a rather simple Model-View architecture, the Redux architecture pattern and the ViewState MVVM.
Many people criticized Dart because it was missing features like Extensions that programmers knew and love from other programming languages like C#, Swift or Kotlin.
This Year at Google IO, the Dart team announced three new features. One of them is Dart Extension Methods.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room… Gradle… To be honest, I hated Gradle. It was always one of the biggest pain points in my carrier as a developer. Whenever I ran into a „Gradle issue“ during Android development, I immediately knew: This is going to be a bad day. All I could then […]
Roughly one month ago Apple showcased SwiftUI at the WWDC 2019. Since we humans can only focus on one new thing, all the hype was reserved for SwiftUI and people almost missed Apple’s second big announcement: Combine. A lot of folks were seeing Combine only as an enabler for SwiftUI, but Combine also introduces first-class […]
Declarative UI Frameworks are on the rise. After third-party frameworks such as React Native, Litho and Component Kit, Apple and Google finally published their own solutions called Swift UI and Android’s Jetpack Compose. Today, we will take a look at both and see where the main differences are, why those frameworks exist and how they […]
What is KEEP-87 At QuickBird Studios, almost all of our projects are implemented in either Koltin or Swift. It’s only natural, that we compare these languages and find features in one of them, that we would also like to see in the other. While Swift’s protocols can sometimes be a little bit painful to work […]
— No Game of Thrones knowledge required and NO spoilers included. Promised. — Engineers deal with a lot of issues on their day to day: complicated flows, race conditions, general error handling. But one issue that always sticks out is that of parsing strings. At QuickBird Studios, we see ourselves always coming back to it. […]
Edit A lot has changed since this article was initially released. Many issues that we had are solved. This article is now officially “out of date”. We started using Kotlin Multiplatform and Kotlin/Native. You can expect a follow-up article somewhat in the near future. A very special thanks to the Kotlin-Tooling team, especially to Liliia […]
Still stuck with Pull-To-Refresh in your Flutter app? 🙄 You’ll be thrilled to get to know Pull-To-Reach then. That’s a new way to access controls in your app that are normally hard to reach with your thumb. This is based on the following problem: Phones are getting bigger and bigger. I remember that I could easily […]
Today we will take a deep look at Dependency Injection in Swift, one of the most important techniques in software development and a heavily used concept in many programming languages. Specifically, we’ll explore which strategies/patterns we can use, including the Service Locator pattern in Swift. The intent behind Dependency Injection is to decouple objects by […]
You and your team developed a sophisticated App for iOS, but now you want the same on e.g. on Android and the Web. The problem: the project is so big, where should you even start with the implementation? First, implement all the model classes or rather start with the User Interface classes? Who gets assigned […]
It’s the year 1602 and Gordon is the best blacksmith in the country. Lords from everywhere are making the journey to his smithy to order one of his fine swords. Today, we are taking a look why Gordon is such an extraordinary blacksmith, and more importantly what you can learn from Gordon to become a […]
