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
One Trillion Dollars….
Bit of a big week for Apple. Along with Apple’s third-quarter results, Apple have this week become the first publicly traded company to break through the 1 trillion dollar barrier. 1 trillion! Whilst this might not affect you directly as a developer it does bode well for the future of the Apple ecosystem and is still quite an achievement for all involved.
9to5mac.com
Apple Removes iOS and Mac Apps from their Affiliate Program
In other news this week, Apple have this also announced that they are removing iOS and Mac apps from their affiliate programming as of October 1st 2018. Whilst the signs were there before this announcement, this is a big blow for many app review sites who make much of their money through affiliate sales and does seem a little petty given the other Apple news this week. Anyway, @trollwerks has a good summary of what’s been going on as well as some discussion of some of the wider issues currently affecting the app store.
alexcurylo.com
Design
How to Use Smart Defaults to Reduce Cognitive Load
One of the goals of good design is to provide users with workflows that let them achieve their goal with the minimum of effort. One way to help with this is to select smart defaults within your apps workflow. @101babich explains more.
shopify.com
Sponsored Link
New Book: Server Side Swift with Vapor
If you’re a beginner to web development, but have worked with Swift for some time, you’ll find it’s easy to create robust, fully-featured web apps and web APIs with Vapor 3. This book starts with the basics of web development and introduces the basics of Vapor; it then walks you through creating APIs and web backends; creating and configuring databases; deploying to Vapor Cloud; testing your creations and more!
Swift
Equatable
@gregheo has been digging into Swift’s Equatable protocol this week, looking at what it is and how conformance can be synthesised by the Swift compiler.
swiftunboxed.com
Structuring Swift Code
With apps (and more precisely their code bases) tending to grow over time, @johnsundell has been looking at some of the ways to structure your Swift code to make it more readable and maintainable in the longer-term.
swiftbysundell.com
Building Arrays with compactMap
I’m fully behind this one from @jesse_squires. compactMap can be *super* useful when working with arrays that may contain optionals.
jessesquires.com
Code
Practical Swift Markov Model — Get the best out of ML
Have you ever stopped to think about how iMessages text prediction works? In this article @dineybomfim explains the concept of Markov Models and and walks you through a small library that you can use to make your own text generator.
medium.com
UIGraphicsRenderer
CoreGraphics has provided developers with powerful 2D rendering capabilities years but that doesn’t mean things haven’t been developing in that time. In this article, @jordanmorgan10 looks at one of the newest additions to the framework – UIGraphicsImagerenderer – a class with some bells and whistles that makes working with CoreGraphics much nicer.
medium.com
Scrollable UIStackView
@vasarhelyia with advice and guidance on how to get UIScrollView and UIStackView to play nice when using AutoLayout.
alltheflow.com
Libraries
WeScan
Modelled after UIImagePickerController, WeScan from the team at @WeTransfer makes it super-easy to add document scanning functionality to your app.
github.com
SourceEditor
Based on SavannaKit, Source Editor @LouisDhauwe is a fast, native source code editor for your iOS and macOS applications. It’s still early days and only supports Swift at this point but looks promising.
github.com
Comment
Welcome to this weeks issue of Swift Developments! There’s been some great stuff from around the community this week and it was a bit of a task to whittle things down! Added to this I’m happy to have the team at RayWenderlich.com back as a sponsor this week. I’d thoroughly recommend checking out their book on Server-Side Development with Vapor if you haven’t already – I’ve been slowly working my way through it over the past few weeks and can personally attest that it’s a great way to get up to speed with the Vapor framework.
On the topic of sponsorship, if you, our your company, are looking to get the word out about your product or service, drop me an email or take a look at the link below. Sponsorship really helps with the ongoing costs of publishing Swift Developments each week and really helps with making Swift Developments more sustainable in the long-term so whatever support you can provide is greatly appreciated. Ok, enough of me and sponsorship. Let’s get on with what you’re really here for – this weeks links. Have a great week and enjoy!