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
Updated Certificate for Game Center Authentication
If you’ve got a game in the store that’s uses Game Center and Apple’s Game Center Player ID verification certificate, you may need to do a bit of work in the next few days. On Feb 13th a new X.509 certificate will be available and the previously issued certificate will expire. This won’t be an issue if you’re dynamically querying the publicKeyUrl value, but if you’re caching the certificate locally your probably going to want to grab the new one.
apple.com
Business
Designing and Engineering Better Teams to Build Better Products
There is always a little tension between designers and developers but how do we bring these two groups closer together to build cross-functional teams that delivery outstanding products for our users? This article from @demersdesigns, although primarily aimed at designers, provides some useful things to consider.
invisionapp.com
Top 11 iOS App Analytics Tools in 2017
Analytics are an important part of understanding how customers use your apps but with so many analytics frameworks available, which one should you choose? The team at @Appseecom provide a quick rundown of some of the alternatives (including a solution of their own).
medium.com
Design
My Mac App Icon Design Workflow
Whether it’s on the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad or the TV, app icons are usually the first thing that users see when they first encounter your app. Coming up with an idea for your apps icon and developing it into a great app icon is a difficult task though. In this article, @marcedwards provides some useful tips for designing icons or your own as he outlines the workflow he uses for designing app icons for the Mac.
bjango.com
A Crash Course in UI Design
As developers, there are often times when we have to dabble in the design side of things, especially if you’re an indie. However, understanding the difference between UX and UI and where they fit into the overall design process can be a little confusing if your new to the discipline. Jeff Wang provides a crash course.
medium.com
Code
A Comprehensive Guide to iBeacon Interaction with Swift
@mattnedrich dives into all things iBeacon, looking at what they are, how they work, how to interact with them in Swift as well as providing a number of useful lessons learnt.
atomicobject.com
Using the Speech Recognition APIs in iOS 10
iOS 10 brought a number of new features including the capability to interact with Siri via two new frameworks: SpeechKit and SiriKit. In this tutorial, @BalestraPatrick dives into the former, using the new speech recognition APIs to develop an example flight checking app.
tutsplus.com
Tools
Locating the Source of a Memory Leak
@xcadaverx with a nice tip on how to use Xcode’s Malloc Stack Logging to track down the exact lines of code that are causing memory leaks.
medium.com
One-Click Deployment
I’m a big fan of continuous integration and one-click deployments. In this article, @fotiDim shows you how to setup a system of your own using Xcode 8, macOS Server, Testflight and Fastlane.
medium.com
IBAnalyzer
This week saw the release of a new tool from @arekholko. IBAnalyzer aims to catch some of the common xib and storyboard-related issues that you might encounter such as unimplemented outlets and actions or IBActions that aren’t connected to the code, all without ever having to build and run your code. It’s still early days but looks promising.
holko.pl
Libraries
Guaka
Writing command line tools in Swift is becoming increasingly popular. Guaka by @ifnottrue is a new POSIX compliant framework that provides some great support for both simple and complex command line flags.
github.com
Lottie
Lottie is a new open source tool from the team at @AirbnbEng providing an iOS, Android and React Native library that renders Adobe After Effects animations in real-time and allows native apps to uses these animations as if they were simple static assets. Time to break out the animations!
medium.com
Videos
Testing an Untested App
This might sound familiar. You start at a new company or join a new team and find a code base without any tests. @codermay provides some tips on how to start adding tests to your new code base.
realm.io
Rubik’s Cubes and Genetic Algorithms in Swift
Fun talk from @javi discussing one of his side projects that uses genetic algorithms to attempt to solve a scrambled Rubik’s cube. Also provides a nice gentle introduction to genetic algorithms if you’ve never played with them!
skilled.io
Other
Scaling Open Source Communities
Following the meteoric rise of Fastlane over the last few years, @KrauseFx imparts some of the lessons he’s learnt after growing his open source project from a single engineer to over 500+ contributors.
krausefx.com