Swift Developments is a hand-curated newsletter containing a weekly selection of the best links, videos, tools and tutorials for people interested in designing and developing their own apps using Swift.
News
The App Store Purge Is Well Underway
According to a new report this week, Apple is starting to make good on it’s promise to clean up the App store. According to new figures from @SensorTower, over 47,300 outdated and abandoned apps were removed from the this month but with over 2 million apps on the store, I suspect there is still a way to go. This article from @sarahintampa on @techcrunch has a nice roundup of what’s been happening.
Business
Why Deadlines Need to Drop Dead
An interesting perspective from @_ericelliott on why deadlines, instead of helping team productivity and morale, can actually be seriously destructive.
You can still make $ millions by creating apps on the Mac App Store
The Mac App Store has had a bit of a torrid time in the last year or so with many high profile developers and companies leaving the store to head off on their own. However as @denzhadanov explains, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t still money to be made on the store.
Design
How to Use Images to Improve Mobile UX
A picture’s worth a 1000 words – @101babich on how to use images within your app designs to enhance your apps user experience.
5 Easy Initiatives to Dramatically Improve Your App’s UX
Looking to improve your apps user experience? The team at @Appseecom have easy things you can do improve things.
Progress Bars vs Spinners – When to Use Which
If I’m honest I don’t think I’ve every consciously thought when I should use which in which situation. Some nice tips on this topic from Anthony Tseng at @uxmovement
Code
First and the Rest
In this article, @figureink‘s search for an elegant way of splitting a Swift array into it’s first and remaining elements. The solution he comes up with may not be the one you first think of.
Functional Programming in Swift 3
@mislavcodes with a brief introduction to functional programming in Swift 3 along with lots of example code for those just dipping their toes in the world of functional programming.
Program To An Interface, Not an Implementation
@ctarda with a good reminder that in an object-oriented development, encapsulation is a particularly useful technique.
ctarda.com
Tools
Understanding Data Race Detection by Implementing It In Swift
Xcode’s new Thread Sanitizer feature is a brilliant new tool for identifying race conditions within your code but how does it actually work? @benjaminencz takes a look.
PlaygroundTDD
If TDD is your thing, (and even if it isn’t) this Playground project from @team_whiskerz is a great resource allowing you to write both your unit tests and your code all without leaving your playground.
Libraries
Overdrive
Overdrive by Said Sikira is a task based concurrency library built on top of GCD provide multithreading, concurrency and blazing speed.
Siesta
A nice little library from the team at @teambustout providing simplified, resource-centric, client-side caching of RESTful resources.
Bon Mot
A useful library from the team at @raizlabs that helps abstract away many of the complexities of working with attributed strings on iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS.
Testing
How to Make More Useful Swift Mock Objects
Mock objects are a powerful technique for managing dependencies in your unit tests. In this article, @qcoding explores how to make them more useful.
Testing the User Interface with FBSnapshotTestCase
@dasdom takes a look at Facebook’s open source components FBSnapshotTestCase, and how we can use it as an alternative to Xcodes built-in UI testing framework.
Videos
Random Talk: The Consistent World of Noise
Interesting try! Swift talk from @batalia discussing GameplayKit and the nature of randomness.
Incremental Swift
@etsy‘s Amy Dyer provides some great advice for developers attempting to transition their Objective-C code bases to Swift.