Category: Configuration

DevOps: Installing macOS 13.0 Ventura and downloading/installing older available macOS versions

Apple likes to publish a new Mac operating system every year, including beta versions and incremental builds, and there can sometimes be many of those released throughout the year, like we’ve seen in 2022. On October 24 of this year, Apple graced us with macOS Ventura 13.0. Last year, 2021, the company gave us macOS 12.0 Monterey. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just get a list of available macOS versions, select the one you want, have that macOS installer app download to your /Applications folder, and then you can run that installer whenever you’re ready? You can and I’ll show you how. Here’s what you see after you download the installer for macOS 13.0 Ventura (installer highlighted in green):

More specifically, I’ll tell you how to install Apple’s new and first alpha version of its desktop operating system software, macOS Ventura 13.0, from a Mac that is most likely still on macOS Monterey — especially if you keep up with the Apple world. I’ll also tell you how to download installers for approximately every public macOS build number within the last two years.

In today’s tutorial, we’ll be using the dreaded command line, but don’t worry. All that pretty user interface can just make code more buggy, and Apple always seems to have problems with getting new macOS versions downloaded and/or installed. Today, we’ll be cutting out some fluff and talking (almost) directly to macOS using a Terminal command called softwareupdate. It’s very reliable. I know everything I show you here today works on Monterey and Ventura and I know the command goes all the way back to macOS El Capitan 10.11. If you’re using softwareupdate on an older macOS version, just do a man softwareupdate at the command line and study the help. Here we go…

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Beyond the sandbox: using app groups to communicate between iOS or macOS apps

Apple’s “app group” technology allows a collection of sandboxed macOS or iOS apps from the same development team to all communicate with each other, coordinate functionality, share resources, and/or minimize redundancies. Notice that I said that I can get sandboxed apps to communicate with each other. But isn’t sandboxing a security mechanism meant to keep apps isolated from each other? Yes and no. Apple realized at some point that it would allow apps developed by the same team, with the same Team ID — built by the same people and thus hopefully less risky — to intercommunicate. I’m glad they did as the usefulness of app groups outweighs the dangers.

As long as all developers involved in creating apps meant to be part of an app group can securely share a Team ID from an Apple Developer portal account, they can write apps that can transcend sandboxing. A company may carefully decide to share its Team ID with a trusted partner company, not just with different teams within its own organizational structure.

Member apps of an app group share access to a special group container, a shared folder structure, whose root folder has the same name as the app group ID. In the macOS sample app that accompanies this tutorial, several apps share a preference stored in a .plist file that lives in the special group container. The preference is the background color to be used by app group apps’ UIView instances. If one app sets (writes) this shared background color preference to, say, the color green, other app group members read this preference and can change their view layer backgroundColor property to NSColor.green.cgColor. By starting an app group, I’ve created the beginnings of a group of related apps sharing — centralizing — settings like view color scheme, even if all the apps are sandboxed.

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Using the ‘plutil’ utility to fix improperly-formatted Xcode plist files

How do you find typos (syntax errors) in an improperly formatted plist (property list) file, especially when Xcode provides absolutely no detail about badly formed XML? I often see plist files with a thousand or more lines of text! In this article, I’ll show you how to fix plist bugs — and do a few other things — by using the little-known plutil command line tool.

How many times have you seen the following error message, shown below in textual and graphical format, when doing a build?

Info.plist build error

Jump straight to the fix or take a minute to read a little background.

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Dividing and conquering your Xcode projects with targets

My original article — “Dividing and Conquering Your Xcode Projects with Targets” — was published on appcoda.com.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to leverage Xcode targets to control the massive complexity involved in building iOS (and macOS, watchOS, and tvOS) apps. A lot of time can be saved when developers realize that not everything they’re required to do has to be done by writing software language code, like Swift. Integrated development environments (IDEs) like Xcode offer very powerful tools, like targets, that allow developers to decouple nitty-gritty tasks that used to be done in code (or manually) out into project configuration settings. I’ve found that, because of the sheer number of project settings, developers often take one look at say, Xcode’s long, long list of Build Settings, and want to curl up and pass out. When finished reading this tutorial, you’ll see that you can neatly organize code into one project that’s capable of producing binaries for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

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The fix to Mojave slowing down to a crawl and freezing

If you’re one of the brave people who’ve installed Apple’s new Mojave (macOS 10.14) operating system, you may be experiencing extreme sluggishness and steady slowdowns after boot until everything just freezes up and you can’t do anything. It’s really exasperating, but there’s a cure for the freeze-ups… If your Mac’s primary drive has multiple partitions, and/or you have an external drive attached, and/or your external drive has multiple partitions.

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Xcode 9 playground error: No such module ‘UIKit’ (or ‘AppKit’)

While creating a new Xcode playground on my MacBook Pro today, I got the most bizarre error message: “No such module ‘UIKit'”. I was using Xcode Version 9.2 (9C40b). Yes, I know there are more recent versions, but I haven’t had the need to upgrade my MacBook Pro. Parenthetically, I do have Xcode 9.4.1 (9F2000) and Xcode 10 beta 6 (10L232m) loaded on my main development machine. I’ll share the solution to this problem with you in the hopes that you, like me, will learn something new about Xcode today.

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Finding memory leaks with the Xcode Memory Graph Debugger and fixing leaks with unowned and weak

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to track down memory leaks within Xcode via the Memory Graph Debugger, new since Xcode 8. This is a powerful visual tool and doesn’t require you to step out of Xcode and start the Leaks Instrument. Once we identify some memory leaks, I’ll show you how to plug those leaks by using the Swift language’s weak and unowned qualifiers, and talk about the differences between the two qualifiers.

I recently discussed iOS memory management and memory leaks that occur when using reference semantics and reference types (classes) in my tutorials on “Swift 4 memory management via ARC for reference types (classes)” and “Fixing memory leaks — strong reference cycles — in Swift 4.” After reading these articles, you should understand how easy it is to inadvertently encode and introduce a strong reference cycle into your Swift 4 code and thus end up with a memory leak. You should also understand how generally straightforward it is to fix such a memory leak. My sample code in both tutorials was didactic. What about real-world projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code? Suppose that you’ve heard reports of diminished app performance, low memory warnings, or just plain app crashes. Finding memory leaks in your code is quite cumbersome when trying to debug via rote inspection, setting breakpoints, adding logging statements, etc.

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New in iOS 12 – Adding a Custom UI and Interactivity Inside Local and Push Notifications

My original article – “New in iOS 12: Adding a Custom UI and Interactivity in Local and Push Notifications” – was published on appcoda.com.

INTRODUCTION

If you look at Apple’s “What’s New in iOS” 12 page, you’ll find a section entitled “Interactive Controls in Notifications,” which exclaims:

Notification content app extensions now support user interactivity in custom views. If the content of your app’s notifications needs to prompt user interaction, add controls like buttons and switches.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to give your local and remote (push) notifications a custom user interface (UI). Users can now interact with a notification’s content area. iOS 12 has given us the ability to add a UIViewController subclass to notifications which we can customize. We can add controls like UIButton, UIImageView, and UISwitch to the view controller, wire up custom functionality using IBOutlet and IBAction, and arrange our custom UI using Auto Layout — all within the notification itself. We can provide support for more than a single tap. We can develop pretty much any type of user experience we want, within notification space limitations and timing considerations.

I’ll show you how a user can take action in response to a notification by interacting only with a customized notification interface, and conveniently not having to open up an app. I’ll be showcasing software released to developers just ten days ago (June 19), specifically iOS 12 beta 2 and Xcode 10 beta 2.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able allow to your app users to get a notification, see a custom UI, click on a button, and get a confirmation — all inside a notification, like so:

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New in iOS 12 – Implementing Provisional Authorization for Quiet Notifications in Swift 4.2

RELATED: Learn how to add a custom user interface INSIDE OF local and push notifications in “New in iOS 12 — Adding a Custom UI and Interactivity Inside Local and Push Notifications.”

With iOS 12, Apple fine-tuned the notification authorization process and expanded notification delivery options, giving developers the ability to build apps with high opt-in, reaction, and retention rates, thus leading to potentially higher revenues. The company announced these new features during a WWDC 2018 presentation entitled “What’s New in User Notifications.” App developers now have the ability to start sending notifications without explicit permission, i.e., on a trial basis. Apple calls this new notification management protocol “provisional authorization” which is closely related to a feature they’ve named “deliver quietly.” In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to encode these new notification features using software released to developers just fifteen days ago (June 19), specifically iOS 12 beta 2 and Xcode 10 beta 2 (which includes Swift 4.2).

To give you an idea of the code I’ll be writing and explaining in this tutorial, here are two videos of my sample app delivering a notification provisionally on an iPhone 8 Plus. Notice iOS 12 has multiple options for configuring how future notifications will be delivered:

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iOS 11 Files app integration and the UIDocumentBrowserViewController

My original article — How to Integrate Your App with Files App in iOS 11 — was published on appcoda.com.

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to embrace iOS 11’s Files app. First, I’ll walk you through configuration of an app so that any files stored in its iOS file system-based “Documents” folder are made visible in the Files app and exposed to other apps installed on your device. Second, I’ll demonstrate how you can incorporate a Files app-like interface and functionality into your own apps. All of the Swift code I wrote to accomplish these two tasks is included below — and I’ve taken lots of screenshots regarding Files app integration. Sit back, enjoy, and learn about a fundamental paradigm shift in the iOS zeitgeist, moving from a “hide-the-details” (like hiding individual files) mindset to providing users with the ability to look at and manipulate files related to their apps using a macOS Finder-like interface, except on iOS.

To pique your interest, let’s look at a feature I encoded in the final app for this tutorial. We’ll use my app, named “Document-Based App,” to view an image file in the app’s main folder:

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