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
Build a Business, Not an App
The times of building a single app and striking it rich are, for the most part, long gone so is it time to change your approach to building apps for the store? @bitario provides some useful reminders that building and publishing and app is just a small part of what goes toward making an app a long-term success.
standardnotes.org
My iOS Ratings Prompt Verdict
Back in January, Apple announced that as of iOS 10.3, the iOS SDK would support a native API for prompting users for reviews and ratings via a new SKStoreReviewController class. But now, some 10 months later, what effect has this new API had on App Store ratings? @stuartkhall provides some interesting insights.
appbot.co
Design
An Analysis of the Interactions on iOS 11
A lot has changed in iOS 11, especially on iPad and with the introduction of the new iPhone X hardware, there’s also an entirely new set of gestures that have been added to the Apple ecosystem. So how do all these gestures and interactions stack up from a design standpoint? @adhidesign takes a look.
uxdesign.cc
Challenges of Supporting iPhone X
With many developers rushing to upgrade their apps to support the iPhone X, @steviki and _mochs have been kind enough to share some of the lessons they’re learnt whilst upgrading PSPDFKit to support the iPhone X. There’s some useful tips in here.
pspdfkit.com
Swift
@objc Warnings Upgrading to Swift 4
With Swift 4 changing some of the @objc inference rules @kharrison provides some useful insights into how to easily fix the “Swift 4 mode deprecates the Swift 3 @objc inference rules” errors that you may encounter when upgrading your own code base to Swift 4.
useyourloaf.com
Code
Development Tutorial for iPhone X
So you’ve been lucky enough to get your hands on the new iPhone X hardware and your itching to get started with developing, or maybe updating, your apps for the new device. But that new screen layout is a little different from what we’re used to and there are a number of things you’re going to need to do to get your app to look good on this new display. @mataharimau explains all.
raywenderlich.com
Testing
How to Use Golden Master Testing for Your iOS Apps
You’ve probably heard of unit testing and UI testing but what about Golden Master testing? It’s essentially a testing approach that compares the results of your test run against those of a ‘Golden Master’ to ensure your app does not contain any unexpected changes. The most common implementation of this with iOS apps is UI-snapshot testing and in this article @olbrich_jan takes a look at how to get it setup and integrated with your CI system.
medium.com
Mac
A Swift Transition from iOS to macOS Development
@marcvandehey expands his horizons by breaking out from his iOS development sandbox and developing a simple macOS applciation for writing on the screen. It’s a nice introduction to macOS development if your looking to get your feet wet developming for this different and yet at the same time suprisingly familiar environment.
smashingmagazine.com
Libraries
WhatsNew
In similar fasion to Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iMove and TestFlight, WhatsNew is a new micro-library from @BalestraPatrick that you can use to display a short description of any new features that have been added to your app when a user upgrades.
github.com
CFNotify
A fun library from @hallelujahbaby that uses UIKit dynamics to make any view draggable and throwable.
github.com
Videos
Building a Meaningful Apple Watch Experience
@moliver816 talks about some of the design and technical challenges that he and his team at Runkeeper have faced when developing for the Apple watch and provides some great tips and tricks to keep in mind when developing your own apps for watchOS.
vimeo.com
Exploring Natural Language Processing
In this talk from Try!Swift @PaolaNotPaolo provides a nice introduction to Natural Language Processing on iOS and explains how you can harness the capabilities of these powerful APIs to improve the user experience in your apps.
realm.io