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.
Business
How to Make Apple Search Ads Work For Your App
With Apple recently expanding the availability of Search Ads to 3 additional countries – UK, Australia and New Zealand – @DenZhadanov provides some useful tips on how to make the most of Apples new advertising platform.
denzhadanov.com
The Art of Writing One-Sentence Product Descriptions
So what is it your app does? For many developers, answering that question in a single sentence can be a tricky proposition. @davesuperman looks at the art of the one line product description and how to pitch it in terms that your users will understand.
dave-bailey.com
Design
Gamification in UX – Increasing User Engagement
Gamification is the process of building game mechanics and reward systems into your app designs with the idea of improving participation, engagement and loyalty but how exactly do we do this? The team at @tubikstudio provide a great rundown of all the different gamification techniques at your disposal.
uxplanet.org
Swift
Swift Source Compatibility
Source compatibility is an important goal for future Swift releases. In support of this, this week has seen the release of a new source compatibility test suite for the Swift language. The new suite will be a community owned and will be periodically built against the latest development versions of Swift as part of the ongoing CI process. If you’re maintaining a Swift open source project, it’s definitely worth checking out as their accepting submissions.
swift.org
Overloading Custom Operators in Swift
Operators are the fundamental building blocks of any programming language but they have additional power in Swift due to the ability to alter them to suit your needs. @ERDekhayser shows you how.
@raywenderlich.com
Code
A Beginners Guide to Lottie – Creating Amazing Animations in iOS Apps
Created by AirBnB, the Lottie animation framework lets you easily take Adobe After Effects animations and render them in your iOS code. If you’re looking to get started, this article from @simonng provides a useful introduction.
appcoda.com
Simplifying iOS Game Logic with Apple’s GameplayKit Rule Systems
Apple’s GameplayKit framework is a powerful framework containing a number of a features that are useful for both games and other types of app alike. Here, @loufranco focuses on just one it’s core features – it’s rule system – and shows how you can use it to build complex conditional logic from a simple set of rules.
smashingmagazine.com
Testing
Time Traveling in Swift Unit Tests
Testing time-based code such as durations, time-sensitive data or cache invalidation can sometimes be tricky. However, adding waits into your test code, is rarely the solution. @johnsundell turns Time Lord outlining some alternative techniques to manipulate time inside your test suites.
medium.com
Tools
Stark
When designing your apps, it’s important to keep accessibility in mind. Part of this includes catering for users with vision issues such as colour-blind users. This is not as easy as you might think but Stark, a new Sketch plugin by @imcatnoone, @_fookay and @blehnert can help, allowing you to simulate various forms of colour blindness and check the contrast of your colours, visuals and typography all within the comfort of Sketch.
getstark.co
The Value of iOS Code Signing
Although things have improved in recent versions of Xcode, code signing is still the bane of many developers lives with thousands of hours wasted each year. So what about getting rid of code signing all together? Interesting article from @KrauseFx.
krausefx.com
Libraries
Fire
Looking for simple clean Swift networking library for your next project? Fire by @_Meniny might be what you’re looking for providing HTTP/HTTPS networking for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
github.com
TweenKit
TweenKit by @SteveBarnegren is a powerful animation library that lets you animate (or tween) anything making it each to create anything from basic animations to awesome on-boarding experiences.
github.com
BouncyLayout
Add some bounce to your collection view layouts with BouncyLayout from @roberthein supporting both horizontal and vertical scrolling with zero configuration.
github.com
Videos
Functional Swift Conference 2017
It’s a bumper week for video releases this week. We’ll start with this collection of videos from this years Functional Swift Conference. There’s some great talks covering the full spectrum of functional programming in Swift. Definitely worth checking out.
funswiftconf.com
RWDevCon 2016
Adding to this weeks bumper video crop, the team at RayWenderlich.com have this week made all the videos from RWDevCon 2016 free for everyone including 2 workshops, 24+ hrs of hands-on tutorials, 600+ pages of conference books and and whole load of sample projects. Great resource.
raywenderlich.com
Other
Side Projects
Although this is an old one, I saw it again this week and have put it up on my wall as a reminder…
imgur.com