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
AccuWeather Under Fire
AccuWeather have come under fire this week over their app sending location-identifying information to a monetisation firm without their users permission. @gruber has written up a pretty good summary of the situation. The TLDR; version is if you haven’t got a users permission to use their data for something then (and it’s not rocket science) DON’T use it (and yes, that includes sharing it with third-parties without the users permission). Not only that but if your app HAS been using a users data without their permission (and you subsequently get caught), don’t try and use clever language and sleight of hand to try weasle your way out of it. Honesty and transparency is ALWAYS the best policy.
daringfireball.net
Business
Are App Reviews Worth Reading?
App reviews can provide a goldmine of information on both what your doing well and also on areas for improvement. In this article, @saitojohn hightlights some of his biggest take aways from reading over 1000 reviews of his and his teams app at Dropbox.
medium.com
Turn Your App Users into Branch Fanatics: Here’s How
By far the easiest way to promote your app is through word of mouth but turning your app users into fanatics who will spread the word is not always an easy task. So how DO you go about turning your apps users into raving fans. The team at @AppPartner provide some guidance.
apppartner.com
Design
Rules for Creating Perfect Push Notifications
Love them or hate them, push notifications are here to stay but with users being bombarded with useless and distracting push notifications every day, how to you make yours stand out from the crowd? @101babich provides some tips.
Get To Grips with Mobile App Onboarding
@yana_yelina looks at three of the most common approaches to app onboarding and on the way, delivers some useful tips to consider when incorporating onboarding into your own apps.
creativebloq.com
Swift
Uising Swift Codable With Property Lists
With the introduction of Swift 4’s new Codable protocol, serialising and deserialising data from external formats has become significantly easier. In this article, @kharrison look at how to use some of this new serialisation goodness with Property lists.
useyourloaf.com
Dijkstra’s Algorithm In Swift
@zntfdr combines Swift, graph theory and Dijkstra’s Algorithm to to find the shortest distance between two nodes in a graph. If you’ve never touched on graph theory before its a gentle and interesting introduction with applications in a wide range of areas.
medium.com
Code
DRY String Localization with Interface Builder
@victorpavlychko shares some handy little tips for localising your XIB or storyboard files without resorting to duplicate view layouts.
medium.com
8 Mistakes to Avoide While Using RxSwift
In this, the first in a multi-part series, @_siejkowski shares 8 of the most common pitfalls facing those in the process of learning RxSwift.
polidea.com
Hotswapping CoreML Models on the iPhone
Although CoreML has delivered some significant new capabilities through the use of .mlmodel files, these files normally need to be included at compile time and changing them tends to require a full recompile of your app. In this article though, Camilla Dahlstrøm outlines a few techniques for updating these models without requiring a full recompile and discusses the speed and storage tradeoffs that each approach introduces.
zedge.net
Testing
Testing Auto-Renewable Subscriptions in iOS
With Auto-renewable subscriptions working differently in TestFlight, the Sandbox and on the App Store, @drbarnard attempts to bring some clarity to the situation with an extremely useful set of notes on what to look out for when using auto-renewable subscriptions in your own apps.
davidbarnard.com
Tools
Swift Local Refactoring
One of the big steps forward for Xcode 9 will be the inclusion of a brand new refactoring engine supporting a wide range of refactorings within your Xcode project. The bigger news though is that this new engine has also been open sourced allowing additional refactoring actions to be contributed by the community opening up a wide range of possibilities as we move forwards. With this in mind, @xge_apple has published a great article on the Swift.org blog that explains how to get started if you want to contribute a refactoring of your own.
swift.org
Libraries
StorageKit
StorageKit from @MarcoSantaDev and @ennioma helps reduce the complexity of apps persistence layer by providing a clean separation between your application logic and your persistence layer of choice. This in turn lets you focus on building your app whilst also making it easy to change your persietence layer in future (should you need to).
github.com
FeedKit
As you might have guessed, collecting links for Swift Developments each week, I’m a big fan of RSS, Atom and JSON Feeds. As a result, this Swift library from @nmdias caught my eye letting you easily incorporate feed parsing capabilities into your own apps. Maybe that should be my next side-project. ?
github.com