Wanted: new maintainer for ViewDeck
I'm pretty sure that if you found this blog, you also know about a little piece of software I wrote a few years ago: ViewDeck. The initial commit was on December 3rd, 2011. I'd been doing nearly a year of iOS development at that moment, and both the Facebook and Path apps came with this nifty new feature we now call "a hamburger menu".
I remember finding it an interesting piece of user interaction and wondered how it was implemented, and so set out one night to try to recreate something like it myself. At that point, not an awful lot of libraries existed that recreated that UX, so I had no way to base my code on somebody elses creations. By the end of the night I had a mostly working prototype, and decided to continue working on it, and to share it with the world. After all it might come in handy for someone else and it was a fun way of showing of what I did (YEAH BABY).
XcodeGhost: verify your Xcode
Update Sept 28th: this article is now also cross-posted on the iCapps blog, as part of their #iCappsiOSMonth series in September 2015
Recently a malware issue for the iOS app store (which is a rarity in itself) called XcodeGhost made its appearance. I'm not going to go into the gory details, but it boils down to a malware injection through a patched version of Xcode. When building iOS apps with such an Xcode, the app binary is modified transparantly, injecting malware into your app at runtime. Nothing is downloaded from the internet, the malware just gets compiled into your app.
There's not a lot you can do about this, except to make sure that you're using a legit Xcode. You can do this by never-ever downloading a version of Xcode from a location other than Apple's, which is either from the Mac App Store, or from http://developer.apple.com) (I know this is easier said than done, saying this from my chair in the middle of super-connected Europe).