Recently, I’ve released a few new versions of the CouchDB client for Swift. The latest version is version 2, and it includes several key changes:

• Updated the minimum required Swift tools version to 6.0.
• Adopted Swift Concurrency. CouchDBClient has been updated to be an actor.
• Renamed the library from couchdb-vapor to couchdb-swift to better reflect its purpose as a general CouchDB client for Swift, beyond Vapor-specific use cases.
• Made some changes to the initializer. Instead of passing a lot of parameters, it now accepts a Config structure.
• You can pass your own HTTPClient instance to be used in the client.
• Added translations for error messages.
• Introduced a dedicated tutorial for integrating CouchDBClient with the Hummingbird server-side framework.
• Added a shutdown() method to properly release resources associated with the HTTPClient.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

In the previous article, I've explained how to add a Strings Catalog to a Swift package to support localizations. Now, we'll try to translate it into more languages.

Recently, I've been working on a Swift Package with some strings that I wanted to localize. Apple's documentation on this topic seems to be a bit outdated. The documentation still suggests using language-specific directories for localizing resources and strings.

But, at WWDC 2023, Apple introduced String Catalogs. It's much more handy - just a JSON file that Xcode can fill with all the strings that need to be localized. Most of the examples you can find are about apps, not packages. So, I've spent some time trying to figure out how to use String Catalogs in a Swift package.

My Mac is using 2 folders to store apps: one is in the user folder ~/Applications, the second is the system applications folder at /Applications.

One day I created a search filter in Finder and saved it to have all the available apps in one place, also did put it to the sidebar in the Favourites section.

But also I love to have a shortcut in the Dock. So I've added a grid here too. It worked as I expected until I updated to macOS Sequoia and tried the iPhone Mirroring app once. Now the grid shows some apps from my iPhone too:

An interesting thing is that only Dock's grid shortcut shows the apps from my iPhone, but not the search in Finder.

And here comes the funny part - that's what you'll see if you will try to launch an app from your iPhone:

macOS 18.0 or later? Really? I wonder if that's some feature planned for a future macOS update. Will see :)

Вышло обновление для AppMetric, версия 1.12.0. Допиливал его в свободное время. Из нового в последних версиях:

• Ревьюверам Apple почему-то не нравится теперь OAuth-авторизация через Safari, пришлось переделать через встроенное окно с WKWebView. Надеюсь, в следующем SwiftUI наконец-то появится свой WebView, и больше не придется использовать обертку.
• Добавил кнопку для быстрого перехода на статистику приложения на сайте Appmetrica.
• Добавил просмотр статистики в виде графиков - как каждого показателя, так и всех показателей вместе. Всего спустя 7 лет после того, как один из пользователей попросил добавить графики :)
• Добавил перевод интерфейса на несколько языков. Благо, с помощью ИИ это сделать теперь совсем просто.

Recently, I’ve been updating docs for the CouchdbClient library. After struggling with some phrases, I decided to try AI to do that for me. Microsoft has Copilot as part of Bing search in the Edge browser.

Обновил AppMetric для macOS - клиент для сервиса AppMetrica от Яндекса.

• Исправлена ошибка, когда при выборе сегодняшней даты она не обновлялась при смене дня.
• Добавлено форматирование цифр показателей (в зависимости от языка и региона в системе).
• Небольшие исправления.

Have you ever needed to package your application for distribution on macOS? The solution is simpler than you might think, and it's right at your fingertips in the Terminal. I recently stumbled upon a handy bash function that streamlines the creation of a DMG (Disk Image) file. Here's how to set it up:

Step 1: Edit Your Profile

nano ~/.zprofile

Step 2: Add the Bash Function

Next, insert the following function into your .zprofile. This script utilizes the hdiutil command, which is built into macOS, to create an HFS+ filesystem within a DMG file.

dmg(){
    hdiutil create -fs HFS+ -srcfolder "$1" -volname "$2" "$2.dmg"
}

Step 3: Save and Source Your Profile

After adding the code, save the changes and exit `nano`. To make the function available immediately without restarting your terminal, source your profile:

source ~/.zprofile

Step 4: Use the Function

Now, you can easily create a DMG file for any folder or application. For example, to create a DMG for the 'ModulbankInformer.app', simply run:

dmg ModulbankInformer.app ModulbankInformer

This command will generate a ModulbankInformer.dmg file with the contents of the ModulbankInformer.app directory.

And there you have it - a quick and efficient way to create DMG files directly from your Terminal!

And here we go, one more new version of the CouchDB client library. After the recent post about 1.4.0, Swift on Server released a new version of async-http-client that includes a new implementation of the client singleton. Now it's HTTPClient.shared, so I've updated the CouchDB library to adopt that change. This also means that you no longer need to call httpClient.syncShutdown() if the singleton is used. Additionally, they've bumped the minimum Swift version to 5.8 (which I aslo did in version 1.4.0 of the CouchDB client library). So, I'm keeping the library up to date.

Changelog:

• Bumped the minimum version of async-http-client to the new 1.21.0. If you can't use it in your project, you can still stay on 1.4.0.
• The library will now use HTTPClient.shared (new in async-http-client 1.21.0) internally for requests if no EventLoopGroup is provided.
• No more internal calls for httpClient.syncShutdown() in case of HTTPClient.shared usage.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

A new version of CouchDB Client has been released:

• The library migrated from HTTPClient.Response to HTTPClientResponse, which is similar to HTTPClient.Response but used for the Swift Concurrency API. It also migrated from HTTPClient.Body to HTTPClientRequest.Body. These changes impact the get and find methods. Old methods are marked as deprecated, please refer to the documentation for the updated methods.
• The minimum Swift version is now 5.8.
• The CouchDBRepresentable protocol is now marked as Codable.
• Additionally, a new data model called RowsResponse has been added. It accepts a generic CouchDBRepresentable type, making it easier to retrieve rows from a database. For example:

  let decodeResponse = try JSONDecoder().decode(RowsResponse<MyApp>.self, from: data)

• Lastly, there have been small improvements in the documentation and tutorials.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

Here’s an example code for such a middleware class for Vapor 4:

final class TrimSlashInPathMiddleware: Middleware {
    func respond(to request: Request, chainingTo next: Responder) -> EventLoopFuture<Response> {
        if request.url.path.count > 1, request.url.path.hasSuffix("/") {
            let newPath = String(request.url.path.trimmingSuffix(while: { $0 == "/" }))
            let response = request.redirect(to: newPath, redirectType: .permanent)
            return request.eventLoop.makeSucceededFuture(response)
        }
        return next.respond(to: request)
    }
}

Just add it to configure.swift file:

import Vapor

public func configure(_ app: Application) throws {
    app.middleware.use(TrimSlashInPathMiddleware())

    app.http.server.configuration.port = 8081

    try routes(app)
}

Works with Vapor 4.92.5.

Выпустил небольшое обновление для Модульбанк инфомера. Обновил иконку в статусбаре (тепер узнаваемая), и добавил чекбокс для скрытия счетов с нулевым балансом. Ну и немного рефакторинга.

Исходный код на GitHub: https://github.com/makoni/ModulbankInformer
Скачать можно тут: https://github.com/makoni/ModulbankInformer/releases

TextEditor in SwiftUI still doesn’t have any API to get user selection. But since it’s using NSTextView internally we can subscribe to its notifications.

Here’s an example of getting a substring from user selection:

Recently, there have been a couple of new releases for my Swift CouchDB library. Here are the recent changes:

• dateDecodingStrategy and dateEncodingStrategy can now be passed as parameters for get, update and insert methods.
• Added a check to handle expired authentication cookies.
• Comparing the set-cookie header in the response as lowercased.
• Introduced new methods to utilize the _find API, allowing you to find documents using a declarative JSON querying syntax
• Fixed an issue where the update method didn’t use dateEncodingStrategy parameter.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

Обновил AppMetric для macOS - клиент для сервиса AppMetrica от Яндекса. Предыдущая версия, увы, уже перестала работать, т.к. они изменили формат ответа.

Судя по дошедшей до меня информации, я использовал что-то незадокументированное из их ответа. И, судя по текущим ответам их API - это было количество крэшей. Увы, пришлось выпилить и заменить на количество устройств.

Решил, что раз уж руки дошли, надо осовременить. Переделал всё на SwiftUI, но пришлось сам попап обернуть в старый добрый NSPopover, т.к. MenuBarExtra из SwiftUI уж больно ограничен. Может быть, дойдут руки написать пост об этом. Заодно перевёл всё на Swift Concurrency и графику из SF Symbols. Правда, теперь всё это работает на macOS 13+, но, думаю, те, кому оно полезно, обновляют макось тоже. Ну и, естственно, наконец-то нативная работа на Apple Silicon.

Обновление сегодня прошло ревью и доступно для скачивания. Планирую в будущем добавить всё-таки графики по дням/неделям.

Обнаружил досадный баг в Модульбанк Информере - если был счёт в турецких лирах, то JSON не парсился и данных не было совсем. Исправил в обновлении.

Исходный код на GitHub: https://github.com/makoni/ModulbankInformer
Скачать можно тут: https://github.com/makoni/ModulbankInformer/releases

Недавно увидел, что у Модульбанка, которым я пользуюсь, есть публичный API. Поскольку у них для macOS нет приложения, а приложение для iOS не работает на Apple Silicon (их ограничение в целях безопасности), я сделал небольшой информер, который показывает в статус баре список счетов и баланс.

Приложение macOS 13+, т.к. хотелось выжать из SwiftUI всё самое актуальное, заодно попрактиковаться.

Исходный код на GitHub: https://github.com/makoni/ModulbankInformer
Скачать можно тут: https://github.com/makoni/ModulbankInformer/releases

Just a small update for Swift CouchDB client lib with couple new methods that I needed by myself:

• Added a new method to create a database [docs].
• Added a new method to delete a database [docs].
• Added a new method to check if a database exists [docs].
• Every request handles unauthorised errors now.
• CouchDBClientError model has a description text now.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

Couple months ago I started learning Apple's DocC tool that generates documentation from your source code. I've decided to use as many features as possible so I took my small lib CouchDB Client and added docs to every method including usage examples that Xcode will show in the autocomplete popup. As it often happens, during adding docs and examples I found that many things in the library can be done in a much better way. So I've updated existing methods and added some more that can take a doc as a param and use generic types.

Next step was tutorials. Apple allows devs to create exactly the same tutorials as they have for SwiftUI on their own website. So I've added a couple. They're also part of the repo on GitHub.

Pretty sure that I've spent more time on the documentation than on the lib itself but I hope it's worth it.

CouchDB Client on GitHub | Documentation with examples and tutorials.

import Security

let pass = SecCreateSharedWebCredentialPassword() as String?
print(pass as Any)

Finished new version of Swift CouchDB client. Now it's using only async-http-client as a dependency to make http/https requests. Can be used with Vapor 4.

Available on Github: https://github.com/makoni/couchdb-swift

Here's an example of a model:

struct MyDataModel {
    let title: String
    let message: String
} 

An example of SwiftUI view that you want to display a list:

struct TestView: View {
    var dataArray: [MyDataModel]
    var body: some View {
        List(dataArray) { data in
            VStack {
                Text(data.title)
                Text(data.message)
            }
        }
    }
} 

Using MyDataModel in List will show an error in Xcode:

Sometimes you can't just change a model. It might be a data model from a third party SDK that you're using in your app. But you can create a wrapper for this struct to confirm Identifiable protocol:

struct MyDataModelWrapper: Identifiable {
    var id = UUID()
    var data: MyDataModel
}

let testDataModel = MyDataModel(
    title: "Title 1",
    message: "I wanna be used inside of a List"
)

let wrappedData = MyDataModelWrapper(data: testDataModel)

So the view will look like this:

struct TestView: View {
    var dataArray: [MyDataModelWrapper] 

    some View {
        List(dataArray) { wrappedData in
            VStack {
                Text(wrappedData.data.title)
                Text(wrappedData.data.message)
            }
        }
    }
}

Done.

var myModel: MyModel?
let decoder = JSONDecoder()

do {
    myModel = try decoder.decode(MyModel.self, from: data)
} catch {
    print(error.localizedDescription)
}

Or like this:

let myModel: MyModel? = try? decoder.decode(MyModel.self, from: data)

So I wrote a protocol with default implementation that allows to do decoding just like that:

let myModel = MyModel.decodeFromData(data: data)

And the same for encoding:

let data = MyModel.encode(fromEncodable: myModel)

All you need is just to add protocol conformance:

extension MyModel: Parseable {
    typealias ParseableType = Self
}

It's available on GitHub as a Swift Package: https://github.com/makoni/parsable

Here's a config for a GitHub Actions workflow to build a Swift project. This example is for building a Vapor project using Swift 5.0.3 on Ubuntu 18.04:

name: Ubuntu 18.04 Swift 5.0.3

on: [push]

jobs:
  build_on_ubuntu:
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04

    steps:
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install -yq libssl-dev zlib1g-dev

    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@master

    - name: Download Swift
      run: curl https://swift.org/builds/swift-5.0.3-release/ubuntu1804/swift-5.0.3-RELEASE/swift-5.0.3-RELEASE-ubuntu18.04.tar.gz --output swift.tar.gz

    - name: Unpack Swift
      run: |
          tar xzf swift.tar.gz
          mv swift-5.0.3-RELEASE-ubuntu18.04 swift

    - name: Swift build
      run: |
          export PATH=$(pwd)/swift/usr/bin:"${PATH}"
          swift build -c release

iOS 13 coming this fall will include dark mode. Current macOS already has dark mode. With bringing dark mode to iOS Apple also recommends to web developers to adopt colours for dark mode.

It's pretty easy to implement. All you need is to change CSS for your website and add something like that:

:root {
  color-scheme: light dark;
  --body-background-color: white;
  --body-text-color: #2F2F2F;
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  :root {
    --body-background-color: #222222;
    --body-text-color: #E2E2E2;
  }
}

body {
  background-color: var(--body-background-color);
  color: var(--body-text-color);
}

So you're adding support for colour schemes with color-scheme: light dark; and defining CSS variables.

If you need to test it you can try the latest Safari in latest betas of iOS or macOS or (maybe) Safari developer preview. Developer tools in Safari have a special button to test dark mode.

Interesting: in macOS 10.15 default body background for dark mode is also dark. But in 10.14 it will be white in Safari and Firefox. You need to specify the background colour for the dark scheme if you want to support macOS < 10.15. Apple didn't mention that during the WWDC session. All they did was just remove the background-color property from CSS to let OS choose the background colour. They provide the NSHipster website as an example but its CSS also contains background colour property in CSS to support previous macOS versions :)

I've added dark scheme support to my Space In Box site. Also check the NSHipster site that has it too.

This article is some kind of summary from WWDC video Supporting Dark Mode in Your Web Content.

My server configuration:

• 2 GB RAM
• 1 CPU Core
• SSD
• 125 MBPS Out
• Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
• CouchDB

Benchmark from other server has been launched as:

wrk -t4 -c20 -d5m https://my_url

API just gets some data from CouchDB and returns it as JSON. Vapor project has been compiled with Swift 4.2.

24 сентября вышла новая версия macOS - Mojave. А вместе с ней и Safari 12, который теперь поддерживает установку расширений только из Mac App Store. Пришлось запилить приложение с расширением.

Today I've decided to experiment with HEIF that was introduced by Apple with macOS 10.13 and iOS 11. They said that it has the same quality with much lower file size.

It's supported in the latest versions of macOS and iOS and last models of iPhone can take pictures in that format.

I'm thinking about compressing my home archive of photos and videos. I was experimenting with HEVC (H.265) and results were great - I had reduced the size of my videos by encoding them to HEVC with an awesome util called HandBrake.

I found the only way to convert JPG to HEIF (which has HEIC extension). It's possible with the Preview app from macOS. But it would be interesting for me if I can do it by myself in Swift. So I did :)

My folder with 64 photos from my action camera was 203 mb in JPG format. And it's only 31.3 mb in HEIC.

macOS and iOS support it from the box. And what's interesting - it's easy to add pictures in this format to the Photos library and it will appear on all your devices that use iCloud. But if you want to export this picture from the Photos library - it will be converted to JPG on the fly, so it looks like you can't export the original HEIC file.

The converter is free and open source (but it's for macOS only): https://github.com/makoni/jpg-to-heif-converter

Стояла задача - при касании слайдера анимировать в приложении сделать анимированное увеличение ползунка. Так же, как это сделано у Apple в приложениях Apple Music и Podcasts в плеере, когда начинаешь перематывать позицию воспроизведения. Пока искал способ стандартными средствами, убил немало времени. Очень не хотелось писать прям свой кастомный слайдер, хотелось использовать системный UISlider, что мне, в итоге, и удалось.