Issue 93 – June 20th 2017

posted on 20th June 2017

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

Lessons I’ve Learnt from Three Million Downloads

We’ve heard the stories of those unicorn apps that hit the app-store jackpot and receive thousands of downloads a day but there are also apps, successful ones, that take a gentler trajectory to success. One such app is Class Timetable, and after 6 years, and 3 million downloads, its developer Jordan Smith has learnt some intersting lessons about developing for the app store.
jordansmith.io

An In Depth Look At The New App Store

One of the big changes announced at this years WWDC was the re-design of the app store. @phillfarrugia has a detailed run-down of many of the changes. It’ll be interesting to see what effect these have on the app ecosystem when iOS 11 is released.
prolificinteractive.com

Design

Functionality vs Emotions in Mobile Interface Animation

Adding animations to your app design undoubtedly increase the time it takes to develop your app but can also enhance your apps usability. In this article, the team at @cuberto look at the differences between functional animations – animations that specifically enhance some sort of user interaction – and emotional animation – animations that are just there to add that wow factor.
prototypr.io

Swift

Exploring the new String API in Swift 4

Amongst the multitude of other goodies in Swift 4, the Strings API has received alot of refinement. The changes make strings easier and simpler to use (especially when it comes to characters and substring) and also gains some new goodness in the form of multi-line string literals. @johnsundell takes a look at some of the changes.
swiftbysundell.com

The Surprising Awesomeness of Grouped Dictionaries

Dictionaries in Swift 4 have received a number of new features including a new initializer for grouping input sequences and also gains a new default parameter for key lookups to return default values when keys are not found. @ericasadun provides a number of useful examples.
ericasadun.com

Code

How To Open Deep Links, Notifications and Shortcuts

With iOS now sporting multiple mechanisms for opening links into your app, @stan_ostrovskiy looks at a how to consolidate these different mechanisms in a clean, supportable manner.
medium.com

An Introduction To CoreML – Building a Simple Image Recognition App

Who needs hot dogs when you can have pizza. With the arrival of CoreML, machine learning is being opened up to the masses. In this article WWDC 2017 development scholar, @sai_k1065 shows you how to get started with one of the major new frameworks from this years WWDC.
appcoda.com

CoreNFC

One of the less publicised announcements from this years WWDC was the inclusion of the new CoreNFC framework for detecting NFC tags and reading messages that contain NDEF data extending the iPhone’s capabilities to detect and interact with their surroundings. @EnnioMa has a short (and sweet) tutorial to get you started.
medium.com

Libraries

Kuery

With the arrival of smart keypaths in Swift 4, Kuery by @k_katsumi provides a type-safe Core Data querying API.
github.com

CodableAlamofire

Another new introduction in Swift 4 is the arrival of the new Codable protocol that makes serialising and desiralising data types super easy. Combine this new functionality with Alamofire, one of the most popular Swift networking libraries and you get CodableAlamofire by @iOtbivnoe an extension to Alamofire that converts JSON data into Decodable objects.
github.com

Videos

WWDC 2017 Viewing Guide

With over 130 videos to choose from, there’s alot of choice when it comes to WWDC Session videos. To help streamline your bing-watching over the next few weeks, @kharrison has written a useful guide identifying some of the highlights.
useyourloaf.com