The 9 Best Android App Development Frameworks to Use in 2022

Android has always been a mobile platform with a large share of the market. Together with iOS, they accounted for 71% of all digital traffic in 2019 (in just the U.S.A)! Besides, mobile use is going really strong worldwide as well. With this in mind, it’s only natural that you should master at least one […]

Five Pack Listed as a Top Developer by Clutch

On average, 75% of mobile users in advanced economies own smartphones. Mobile applications are optimized for mobile devices, making them easier to use than going through the company’s traditional website. That’s why it’s no surprise that more companies than ever are investing in mobile app development. As a provider of mobile application development services, we […]

A Simple Pattern for iOS Main Threading

Apple is becoming more and more strict about the proper use of the main thread. Warnings occur all the time in Xcode now, and app crashes occur frequently when UI operations take place outside the main thread. The situation comes up when you have UI operations that take place after an asynchronous data load, or […]

When Your iOS Colors Don’t Match in Storyboards vs Code

The iOS 10 SDK introduced a change that (if you missed it) could cause some serious confusion. The exact change was that, as of iOS 10 SDK, the UIColor init(red:green:blue:alpha:) initializer began using the extended sRGB color space. The confusion around this comes when your interface builder color picker is NOT setting colors according to […]

Why You Need to Know Swift Now

According to Computerworld, if you are a developer, you need to know Swift, and you need to know it now. Apple’s Swift language is an important one to know, and there are several reasons why. 1. Open Source According to rankings of programming language, Swift is in the top ten. It is open source, meaning […]

What to Do with the iPhone X Home Bar Indicator

Apple released their latest and greatest mobile phone the iPhone X (iPhone 10) and along with it a new software-based home button. For users, this introduces a very new and fresh experience with an edge to edge display unencumbered by any physical buttons. However, it also introduces many new possibilities from a software engineering perspective […]

Flexibility using auto layout with nested stack views, augmented with constraints

This walkthrough explains the solution to the challenge in the Nested Stack Views video on raywenderlich.com (https://videos.raywenderlich.com/courses/62-beginning-auto-layout/lessons/5). We’re creating a flexible layout that looks like this: Where the green view expands or contracts based on the available space, like this: Here’s what the final view hierarchy will look like. Because referring to multiple stack views […]

3 Things to Know about iOS CoreBluetooth

Here at Five Pack, I’ve been working on a project that uses a customized Tertium Blueberry, an RFID reader that sends the data to a BTLE compatible device such as an iPhone. It’s a great little piece of hardware, but it’s been a challenge to get the project requirements working… or at least working smoothly […]