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
Fall 2017 Developer Videos
If you haven’t seen them already, along with the arrival of the new hardware, Apple have also posted a new batch of developer videos providing additional details on how to develop for the new hardware. With the iPhone X introducing a number of significant differences from previous generations, I’d recommend paying attention to the Building Apps for iPhone X and Designing for iPhone X videos which both provide additional detail about some of the adjustements you’ll need to make to account for the new layout. Make sure you checkout the video on Face Tracking with ARKit as well as that’s also pretty interesting.
apple.com
App Store Review Guidelines Update
Apple didn’t mention this at Tuesday’s event but there has also been an update the the App Store review guidelines this week. Unsurprisingly most of the changes are foused on Face ID and ARKit along with privacy updates associated with these new technologies but there are also a bunch of other changes including an update to officially ban scam malware scanners from the store similar to those that I mentioned back in Issue 92. Get’s the thumbs up from me.
appstorereviewguidelineshistory.com
Business
Paid Upgrades in the App Store
For many developers, the lack of support for paid upgrades in the app store is a major issue with developers often resorting to publishing separate apps in order to provide upgrade pricing between major versions. However, @bjhomer has come up with an interesting idea for implementing this within a single app. It’s not perfect but definitely worth considering.
bjhomer.com
Mastering iTunes Connect App Analytics
The free app analytics build into iTunes connect are a powerful way to understand how users are interacting with your app and can provide a much better understanding of who your customers are. In this article, @fanchiyinfelix dives into some of the detail looking at the metrics that are available as well as some of the insights that they can bring.
appcoda.com
Design
Gestalt Theory for Efficient UX: Principle of Similarity
Understanding and exploring the ways that user perceive information can be an important part of increasing the usability of your app. In this article, the team at @tubikstudio go back to basics by looking at how people use Gestalt grouping principles to naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and how we can take advantage of these ideas to improve our own app designs.
uxplanet.org
Swift
The Best New Features of Swift 4
Swift 4 is already out in the wild and with it comes a number of nice new features within the Swift language. @mikeash provides a nice rundown.
plausible.coop
Code
iPhone X: Dealing with the Home Indicator
With the arrival of the iPhone X and the removal of the home button, there are a number of new design paradigms that that you’re going to need to take account of in your app designs. One of these is the new home indicator and in this article @JordanMorgan10 provides some useful tips on how to adapt your designs to accomodate this new control.
medium.com
Sourcery in Practice
I’ve mentioned Sourcery in previous issues of Swift Developments. It’s a code generation tool for Swift that aims at removing much of that boilerplate code that you have to write. This week, @khanlou has published an in-depth article on how to use it in practice along with a concrete example to follow along with.
khanlou.com
Libraries
Type Safe Animations in Swift
@octogavrix introduces his animation framework AnyAnimation which provides a set of general definitions and basic components for type-safe animation in Swift.
medium.com
Vega Scroll
VegaScroll from @Applikey is a lightweight animtation flowlayout for UICollectionViews.
github.com
Other
Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security
Since tuesday’s annoucements, a lot has been written in the popular press about the introduction of the new Face ID for iPhone X and whether it will actually deliver on it’s promise of increased security. Until security researchers get their hands on the new device, nobody can really knows but until then, @troyhunt has written a well balanced article on where Face ID fits into the existing security landscape.
troyhunt.com
Finally
Have we finally reached the pinnacle of technology? ?
Couldn’t resist including this…
commitstrip.com
Comment
Wow, it’s been a pretty exciting week! Having fairly successfully avoided the pre-event leaks I actually quite enjoyed sitting down to watch Tuesday’s event and was pleasantly suprised by the various announcements. I’m still not 100% convinced by the design compromises introduced by ‘the notch’, especially in landscape mode but I can understand Apple’s decision and suspect that it’s going to be something that we get used to fairly quickly. Whatever your views on it the new model screen layout there’s no doubting that the device as a whole packs a serious amount of power and it will no doubt lead me to reach for my wallet when pre-orders open. In the mean time though, it’s not just been the iPhone X announcements this week so let’s dive in and have a look at what else has been happening around the community.