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
Apple Launches Free Swift Development Curriculum
Although Swift is still in it’s relative infancy, this week has seen Apple laying it’s plans for the next generation of Swift coders with the launch of a new app development curriculum designed to teach students how to start using Swift and developing fully functioning iPhone apps. It’s great to see.
apple.com
Dash Back on the App Store
Much has changed in the world of Dash since the surrounding controversy and subsequent exit from the app store at the end of last year. This week has seen another, slightly unexpected, step in this story with Dash arriving back on the app store as a free download. Whatever your views of what happened, it’s good to see as Dash is still an extremely useful tool and worth checking out if you haven’t done so already.
kapeli.com
Business
The Science Behind Apps Going Viral
Virality. It’s the holy grail of app developers and most online businesses but it’s an elusive factor that is particularly difficult to capture. In this article, the team at @Appseecom take a look at a number of factors that can contribute to viral growth for your app.
medium.com
Design
Best Practices for Horizontal Lists in Mobile
With the popularity and simplicity of UICollectionView, horizontally scrolling lists are now a common sight in many iOS apps. In this article, @Suleiman_194 details some best practices to think about when incorporating them into your own designs.
uxdesign.cc
Meaningful Motion with Action Driven Animation
When we add animation to our interfaces, we want it to improve and enhance the overall user experience. So how do we animate our interfaces in ways that are not only beautiful but also provide that additional something? @tobiasahlin explains.
Architecture
Do MVC like it’s 1979
@bohdan_orlov takes a interesting look at MVC architectural pattern – examining it’s roots in the late 70’s, some of the patterns inherent flaws as well as the heritage that can be seen in more modern architectural approaches.
badoo.com
Code
5 Easy Dispatch Tips
Dispatch provides a number of great ways to schedule and control the execution of concurrent code. @ericasadun provides five useful examples.
ericasadun.com
To Optional or Not To Optional: IBOutlet
If you’ve been writing Swift for any length of time, you’ll no doubt be aware of the danger surrounding the use of implicitly unwrapped optionals, but invariably we still use them to define IBOutlet‘s in our view controllers code. In this article, @parrots challenges this norm.
curtisherbert.com
How To Build and Table View With Multiple Cell Types
There are those with static cells, those with dynamic cells and then their are those with multiple types of dynamic cell. Enter @stan_ostrovskiy with a guide on how to manage the additional complexity without sinking under a mass of spaghettified code.
medium.com
Tools
Manage Swift Code Snippets With Xcode
@MarcoSantaDev with some useful tips on improving your coding productivity by using Xcode code snippets.
marcosantadev.com
Libraries
DeskTransition
A Swift library from @harshilshah1910 to add card-like transitions similar to those found in the iOS 10 Apple Music and iMessage Apps to your own apps.
github.com
Swift Deep Linking
A simple way to consume custom deep link URLs in your Swift apps by @bach4life
github.com
Google Reporter
A wrapper library and accompanying article from @ksmandersen to provide access to Google Analytics within your app without the need for Google’s binary frameworks. I like the sentiment behind it.
medium.com
Server-Side
Migrating from Vapor 1 to Vapor 2
The recent release of Vapor 2 delivered a smaller code base, quicker compile times and faster performance but it did so at the cost of source-breaking changes. As a result, many early adopters are faced with migrating their code bases from Vapor 1 to Vapor 2. If this is you, you’re going to want to take a look at this article from @candostEN.
theswiftpost.co
Other
A Year of Google Maps and Apple Maps
An interesting article from @justinobeirne on the cartographic evolution of Apple Maps and Google Maps over the past 12 months. Great read.
justinobeirne.com