DATABASE MANAGEMENT

Over the years, technology and data usages have evolved to the extent that we saw emerging new needs and requirements for database management systems. Data storage, data access and data management nowadays require more and more advanced, flexible and adapted tools depending on how the data is being used, but also depending on future business needs and growth. The advent of cloud computing also had an important impact on the development of database technologies.

The two major types of databases, RDBMS and NoSQL databases have various characteristics that differs from one another. The approach of these two types of databases…

SWIFT PROGRAMMING

In this article, you’ll learn how to prepare your App to support multiple languages, including resources translation, regional numeric formats, regional calendar support, and much more.

How to Localize your iOS App?

Localizing your App is not just adding support of translation. It includes adapting your App Interface to support language and regional specificities. That includes supporting different time zones, regional numeric formats, dates, measurement units, etc. All countries don’t use the same type of calendar to show date and time, some countries use the mile system, others the metric system and so on for the other units.

All these differences have to be taken in…

TECHNOLOGY

Like every year in June, Apple organize the WWDC, a series of conferences around development and engineering for iOS, watchOS, tvOS & macOS, that unveils some of the most exciting innovations of the year, and drive App Development, Innovation & Technology to a whole new level for years to come.

This year, the WWDC will last all week starting June, 22, and hundreds of lives sessions follows the introductory Keynote.

Here are some of the coolest features introduced this year, at the 2020 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, including iOS 14, macOS Big Sur, Apple Silicon, App Clips, CarKey and more.

App Clips

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SWIFT PROGRAMMING

UIKit offers a great builtin feature to display animated images in a few lines of code. It allows to create animations for a lot of different use cases, from loading animations, to glowing items, rotating items, and much more.

Here are 5 steps to create and add your own image-based animations to your app. Let’s get started.

1. Create a set of images for your animation

First step, create your animation and export it, image by image, in a directory. Make sure to name each image file with a number indicating its position in the animation, starting from 0 (e.g. 0.png).

In this article I’ll use a sample animation…

SWIFT PROGRAMMING

Thanks to CoreAnimation and CALayer, we can easily apply to any UIView objects a custom shadow effect, through its layer property.

In this article we’ll see how to create 5 well known types of shadows:

• Drop Shadows
• Basic Contact Shadows
• Contact Shadows with Depth
• Flat Contact Shadows
• Curved Shadows

But first, let’s see the 5 properties of the layer that we will use to create cutomized shadows.

shadowColor

Customize the color of the shadow. Default color is UIColor.black.cgColor, which make a dark shadow, but you can also set a light color to create a glow effect, or any other color.

shadowOpacity

Customize…

Swift Programming

With CoreAnimation and CAGradientLayer, iOS makes it easy to create custom gradients of any style. It is possible to create linear, conic and radial gradients, and to customize as you want its colors and orientation. It even supports animating gradient changes for smooth and colourful apps.

CAGradientLayer is a subclass of CALayer, and has been specially designed to easily and quickly make gradient effects. With literally five lines of code, you can generate a new gradient and add it to your view layers.

Here are 5 steps to create beautiful gradients for your apps.

1. Linear Gradient

Creating a layer with gradient colors…

Green IT

With climate change and global warming among others environment challenges in the 21st century, Green IT is becoming a more and more important approach. Here are 8 Core Principles to make your Apps greener.

But first, what’s Green IT?

Also called ICT sustainability, Green IT is the study and practice of environmentally sustainable computing and IT. The goals of this approach are similar to the one used in chemistry (Green Chemistry), which consists of reducing use of hazardous materials, maximizing energy efficiency and recyclability.

Green IT is as much important is large-scale data centers as it is in corporate IT environment or product & services…

Swift Programming

Apple offers to developers tools to integrate Geolocation and Map features to their Apps with MapKit and CoreLocation. Initially based on Google Maps service, MapKit now integrates Maps from Apple Maps service.

Here are 7 steps to add a Map to your App and integrate a real-time Geolocation feature. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Privacy

First, user location is a privacy sensitive information. So based on Apple Guidelines, you are required to add an entry for NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription and write a short description of how you intend to use the location data to have access to these informations.