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
iOS 11’s App Store Increases Downloads of Featured Apps up to 800%
It’s a well known fact that getting featured on the App Store results in a significant bump in app sales but what effect has the new iOS 11 Today Tab had on these numbers? The team at @SensorTower have been investigating and have recently published some new stats showing an increase of up to 800%!
sensortower.com
Design
7 Basic Rules for Button Design
Buttons are a fundamental component in almost all UI designs. @101babich looks at 7 basic rules for designing buttons of your own.
uxplanet.org
Light or Dark UI? Tips to Choose a Proper Color Scheme for Your User Interface
When designing and look at feel of your UI, one fundamental question you’re going to need to decided pretty early on is whether your going to opt for a light theme, a dark theme or maybe build in the functionality to support both. Although choosing between light and dark might, on the face of it, appear to be a relatively simple decision as you’ll see from this article from @tubikstudio there are more factors to consider than you might initially expect.
uxplanet.org
Code
Build a Foursquare Clone iOS app
A great way of improving your development skills is re-creating functionality you see in other existing apps. In this multi-part series, @fabiohiroki takes just this approach, walking you through the creation of a Foursquare clone and covering everything from CoreLocation, RxSwift and networking to state management, tooling and testing.
medium.com
Working with Core Bluetooth in iOS 11
With the rise of the IoT movement, Bluetooth has become an increasingly popular solution for short-distance wireless communication between devices. In this article, @iosbrain does a deep dive into this communication standard, looking at how you can come up the Bluetooth learning curve and how to work with Apple’s Core Bluetooth framework before moving on to develop a simple bluetooth-based heart rate monitoring app in Swift.
appcoda.com
Visualizing an iOS device in Blender Through Quantum Entanglement
Looking for a better way to visualise the attitude values he was receiving from CoreMotion, @JohnCoatesDev embarks on a fun little project to display real-time visualization of your devices orientation via Blender. Nice work!
medium.com
Stack Views And Multi-Line Labels
Although in many cases, stack views make putting together your UI constraints significantly easier, there are sometimes cases where where they hinder rather than help. @kharrison explores one such situation involving multi-line labels where stack views just don’t give you the control you need.
useyourloaf.com
Tools
Playground-Driven Development in Swift
Since their introduction, Playgrounds have shown themselves to be particuarly useful when it comes to rapidly iterating on your UI designs and providing instant (yeah, ok – semi-instant) feedback on your changes. Added to this, Xcode 9 has also added official support for custom frameworks as well but it can be a little tricky to get things setup if you’ve not done it before. In this tutorial, @onmyway133 shows you how.
medium.com
How to Find and Fix Slow Code Using Instruments
In this three-part series, @twostraws dives into Instruments and looks at some of the different ways this powerful debugging and optimisation tool can be used to improve your code.
hackingwithswift.com
Videos
Sharing
Getting involved within the Swift community can be a little daunting when you first get started. With so much great material and so many smart people out there it can be difficult to put your work out there for people to see. In 2012, @johnsundell felt the same way but since then he has grown to be a well known and well respected name within the Swift community. In this talk, John shares some great tips on how to take the plunge, share your work, and get involved.
youtube.com
Becoming An Effective Contributor to Swift
If you’ve been looking to get more involved with the evolution of Swift, this is the talk for you. @harlanhaskins and @CodaFi_ provide an extremely useful tour of the Swift project including how it’s organised, the tools you’ll need to get started, some tips on your first contributions along with a demo that fixes a Swift compiler-crashing bug live on stage!
youtube.com