The original Mac OS X (version 10.0) introduced a new User Interface called Aqua. Steve Jobs was confident that it would look good enough to lick. This was probably due to the way the lighting on the button bubbles made them seem like candy.

This is a tutorial on recreating the Finder window above, which more closely resembles OS X 10.2 (otherwise known as Panther). The main difference between this version and previous versions is the brushed metal background and the lack of pinstripes behind the content.

I’ve achieved this effect with three layers:

• A solid light grey colour
• A…

STEVE: One of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it. So we call it AQUA, and this is the architecture for Mac OS X. And we are incredibly, incredibly excited and pleased with how this has turned out. Now when we talk about user interfaces, um, let me show you… So these are the user interfaces out there, they’re all credible, they all work. How do we take this to the next level? Well let me show you a few slides on Aqua, and then I’d like to demonstrate for you.

The original Mac…

When you want a property to be saved and loaded from the persistent storage called UserDefaults, you can declare it like this:

@AppStorage(“MyKey”) var savedValue

When the app launches, the key is used to retrieve the value. If there is a value, savedValue will have that value. When you change savedValue, UserDefaults is updated automatically. If you’re displaying the value anywhere in your SwiftUI (e.g. in a Text), the value is updated there too. …

Face ID: a Security Upgrade But a Privacy Risk

Face ID, which was introduced with the iPhone X in 2017, solved a major security flaw in fingerprint readers.

As we use smartphone touchscreens without a stylus, our phones get covered in an exact copy of our fingerprints. The iPhone 5S, the first iPhone to use Touch ID, was hacked by scanning fingerprints from the screen within days of its release. A bad actor that has access to your phone has no idea what your face looks like, and there is no way to access the phone without a high resolution 3D scan of your face. Face ID does not…

Parler CEO John Matze has a peculiar take on what has just happened:

Apple will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive polices like twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.

It sounds like he refuses to make an app that could possibly abide by the rules of the app stores.

So what’s going to happen?

Between now and the passing of social media laws by the incoming Biden adminstration, we’re going to have a lot of chaos. The Parler app still…

I heard a rumor that Donald Trump was moving from Twitter to Parler after his account was banned. I wanted to see for myself, as I had already created an account on Parler for periodically watching the downfall of a nation.

What does CEO John Matze think of what’s unfolded this week?

Well, you know I don’t necessarily monitor a lot of this stuff. I participate and watch Parler just as anybody else does. If people are breaking the law, violating our terms of service, or doing anything illegal, we would definitely get involved. …

1. Set TextField Keyboard Focus in SwiftUI

We’re going to make a custom version of TextField that can control whether the keyboard is active. In other words, we’re going to control what the first responder is. First, we need a Coordinator class that will be helpful in responding to events related to UITextView. Since structures can only conform to protocols and cannot inherit from classes, we are using a class for this:

Now, I have a tendency to use extensions of the provided system types that give me convenience initialisers that simplify their creation.

I’m also including a function for conditionally setting the first responder, as…

As far back as 2012 there was evidence that some people in Indonesia who were accessing Facebook on mobile devices thought that they were not internet users. They never used any website, but they used the Facebook app. In other words, they saw the web as an open system that could contain anything, but the walled garden of Facebook was entirely separate.

As Wired put it at the time, “Facebook is on the cusp of becoming a medium unto itself — more akin to television as a whole than a single network, and more like the entire web than just…