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 Acquires BuddyBuild
Some great news for a past sponsor of Swift Developments – @buddybuild – who have been acquired by Apple this week! Although the BuddyBuild team are going to remain in Vancouver, they are merging with the Xcode engineering group which can only be a good thing for Apple development tooling. Maybe we’re going to see some improvements to Xcode Bots in the near future!
buddybuild.com
Business
Working on an iOS app? Be careful. You can lose $100K+ with a single click
iOS apps are not just assets for the app-store revenue that they bring in, they are also assets in and of themselves, holding the potential to generate profits by selling them and subsequently transferring the app and its source code to other developers. Be careful with the frameworks you include though, as you may inadvertently remove this opportunity. Important lessons from @kevntz.
freecodecamp.org
Design
12 Mobile UX Design Trends for 2018
With with 2017 tied up with a bow, @101babich gazes into his crystal ball and looks at some of the biggest mobile design trends that will likely take center stage in 2018.
uxplanet.org
Code
How to Train a Core ML Model for an iOS App
Although CoreML makes it’s it pretty easy to add machine learning models to your app, you’ll soon want to branch out and develop models of your own. In this article, @doronkatz walks you through this process, applying machine learning algorithms to a set of training data to create a model you can then use to make predictions with. No prior knowledge required. ?
tutsplus.com
iPhone X Home Button
@zats breaks out the reverse engineering tools to dig into the mechanics of the iPhone X home indicator. On top of being an interesting insight under the hood, the articles also a nice example of how reverse engineering can be a fun adventure.
zats.io
Today Extension in iOS Swift 4
If you’re looking to extend your app’s presence into the iOS Notification Center and onto the Lock Screen, the team at @stfalconcom have written a nice tutorial walking you through the steps to build your own Today Extension.
medium.com
CAShapeLayer in Depth – Part 2
Looking to get up to speed with the Core Animation framework? @lucastizma has written an in-depth article looking at the Core Animation frameworks CAShapeLayer class. One to add to the reading list if you’re coming up the Core Animation learning curve.
medium.com
Tools
quicktype
For the most part I don’t tend to use extensions to Xcode but having seen quicktype in action I might be changing my mind. quicktype provides a super-quick way of taking some sample JSON data and creating strongly typed models and serializers for working with that data in Swift. Great timesaver.
github.com
Some Useful URL Schemes in Xcode 9
Some nice tips from @dmartincy on automating things using the new URL schemes in Xcode 9.
cocoaengineering.com
Swift
Handling Commands with Swift Package Manager ArgumentParser
With Swift increasingly being used to write command line applications, @eneko takes a look at the ArgumentParser class from the Swift Package Manager project using it to build his own command line tool with subcommands.
enekoalonso.com
Testing
Creating Type-Safe JSON in Swift
With many apps needing to test their networking logic and thus needing to mock network requests with fake data, it’s not uncommon to have fake JSON data stored within your test code – most commonly as string variables. Taking this approach can often lead to errors though and in this post, Sergio Schechtman Sette shows you a much safer way to provide test data for your unit tests by creating type-safe JSON mock data.
medium.com
Comment
And we’re back! Happy New Year! After a relaxing break over Christmas and the New Year period I’m getting back in to the swing of things this week with this, the first issue of 2018! Even with the Christmas lull, a lot has happened since the last issue, such as Apple’s battery go-slow episode reaching what I’d call a fair compromise, Swift Weekly Brief and This Week in Swift sadly coming to an end along with this weeks revelations around the Spectr and Meltdown vulnerabilities sweeping through both the tech and mainstream media alike. On top of this though there have also been some more positive things happening around the community so lets kick things off for 2018 with some big news from the team at BuddyBuild.