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
The App Store Turns 10 Years Old
On July 10th 2008, Apple revealed the App Store to the world, with it’s initial 500 app contengent. Since then the store has evolved and grown and for many it has fundamentally changed their lives. Now, some 10 years later, Apple are celebrating the 10 anniversary of the store with a review of some of the key milestones and successes along the way. It’s interesting to see just how far the store has come but also to think about where it might, and should, go in the future.
apple.com
Business
15 Years Ago I Went Indie and I Didn’t Know It
It’s a bit of an anniversary issue this week. With one of my faviourite writing apps @ulyssesapp turning 15 years old, @macguru17 recounts his inspirational journey from side-project to full-fledged business. It’s a good reminder of why side projects are so important – you never know where they will lead you.
medium.com
Design
The Lotus MVC Pattern
@MatManferdini presents the Lotus MVC pattern – an architectural pattern that follows SOLID design principles and brings together some of the best practices from MVC, MVVM and Viper to create a organised, loosely coupled architecture with clear responsibilities for it’s components. The article’s a long one, but it’s an interesting read.
matteomanferdini.com
Swift
Swift’s New Calling Convention
@jesse_squires discusses the new calling conventions introduced in Swift 4.2 which change how functions receive their arguments and how results are returned from a function. The changes are really under the hood and won’t affect you day-to-day (although they do improve code size and performance) but it is interesting to see what is happening under the hood.
jessesquires.com
Code
Demystifying UIKit Spring Animations
Designing and crafting realistic animations within your app isn’t as easy as you might imagine, even with recent enhancements to UIKit’s animation APIs. In this article @jenoxx tries to improve on this situation, breaking out his physics skills to craft spring animations that have a more natural feel.
medium.com
Adding a Custom UI and Interactivity in Local and Push Notifications
Notifications got some fairly major updates in iOS 12 adding, amongst other things, the ability to add custom interactivity by way of custom views. In this tutorial, @iosbrain shows you how to get started.
appcoda.com
Video Streaming Tutorial for iOS: Getting Started
Dive into the details of the AVKit and AVFoundation frameworks with this tutorial from @lukeparham in which you’ll learn how to add video-streaming features to your app.
raywenderlich.com
Code Data Debugging in Xcode Using Launch Arguments
Some useful tips from @twannl on how to debug your Core Data code using Xcode and launch arguments. There were several of these I hadn’t come across before.
avanderlee.com
Subclass-Free View Controllers in Swift
In this weeks article, @johnsundell provides some tips and techniques for reducing your reliance on subclassing when working with UIKit and UIViewControllers.
swiftbysundell.com
Testing
Why Is Random Test Order a Big Deal for Test Quality?
@qcoding looks at one of the new features being introduced in Xcode 10 – randomized test order and discusses why this feature is so important for improving the quality of your tests. If you read the article, you’ll see that there are still areas for improvement though. Having the ability to *repeat* a particular randomized order is key and I’d recommend following John’s advice at the end of the article and file a radar if you can.
qualitycoding.org
Other
Andy Hertzfeld – Architect of the Original Macintosh
@devonzuegel interviews Andy Hertzfeld – one of the original members of the Apple Macintosh design team and one of the primary architects of the Macintosh Operating System. It’s interesting to hear some of the stories of how the Apple Lisa project, Macintosh and Apple II evolved as well as some of the twists and turns that were taken along the way.
youtube.com