Thoughts, stories and ideas.

The (not so) Weekly Fitz

Programming

Preserve your images' transparency when saving and sharing them, in Swift

Preserve your images' transparency when saving and sharing them, in Swift

Loosing your rounded corners or transparent background when saving an image to the user's photo library or sharing it with UIActivityViewController? It's because it's be turned into a JPEG. Here's how to solve that.

From a base64 API Key to a json file, in bash, on macOS

From a base64 API Key to a json file, in bash, on macOS

While working on a client's app's CI pipeline, I needed to use an API key. However, it was stored as a base64 environment variable, when the tool I needed to use required it to be plaintext in a JSON file. Fun times.

Escape a newline in bash on macOS

Escape a newline in bash on macOS

While setting up a new step for a client's CI pipeline on a macOS agent, I needed to export an API key containing line breaks to a JSON file. Meaning I had to escape line breaks, in bash, on macOS. Turns out, it's not as easy as it sounds. Who would've guessed?

Build OpenCV Contrib as a .xcframework, for iOS, on a M1

Build OpenCV Contrib as a .xcframework, for iOS, on a M1

We needed an OpenCV Contrib module in an iOS app, using Swift Package Manager. I thought the hardest part would be using OpenCV. How wrong I was.

Add a height-flexible placeholder to your UITextView

Add a height-flexible placeholder to your UITextView

Once you have tasted SwiftUI, this kind of UIKit lacking makes you wish you could refactor a client's whole codebase at a snap from your fingers. At least the UI side of it. But, alas, there is no magic spell for that. Yet. What kind of lacking? UITextView doesn't have

Prevent TypeORM from eating up all your memory

Prevent TypeORM from eating up all your memory

Recently, a client told me that the code I had written to sync their systems and a new datasource blew up their AWS EC2 instances. Apparently, the synchronisation engine kept getting killed for using up too much memory. More than a few gigabytes, actually. To sync a few tens of

Fixing the "this cannot include CR/LF" error when doing Basic auth in Ruby

Fixing the "this cannot include CR/LF" error when doing Basic auth in Ruby

Sometimes, opting for sensible defaults seems obvious. Yet, sometimes, the default and most obvious option isn't the most sensible.