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.
Design
The Most Overlooked Growth Hack: Designing for Emotions
Some of the most successful apps are those that trigger an emotional response in their users but how do you foster this in your own app designs? @lisazeitlhuber walks you through some of the basics.
uxdesign.cc
What I Learned Making 5 ARKit Prototypes
@nathangitter has been doing some great work with ARKit lately, exploring the boundaries of what is possible with this developing technology. In this article, he documents some of the lessons he’s learnt and discusses the importance of building prototypes when exploring the future of mobile interaction design.
medium.com
How iOS Apps Adapt to the iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR Screen Sizes
With the arrival of the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max comes a new set of screen sizes. @geoffhackworth has been digging into the detail and looking at what this means for your app designs. He also has a second article that covers the Apple Watch Series 4 as well!
medium.com
Swift
Action Focused Protocols Enhance Testability
@mokagio with some good reminders about structuring and naming your Swift protocols.
mokacoding.com
Code
Prefetching and Images Size Without Downloading Them [Entirely] in Swift
@danielemargutti has been on the optimization trail this week looking at the chicken-and-egg problem of needing to know the size of an image in order to update your layouts in advance of downloading the image itself. It’s an interesting look at some of the internal structure of different image formats.
danielemargutti.com
Adding Padding To A Stack View
Stack views have been a boon for UI layouts automatically creating many constraints on our behalf. In addition to creating constraints though, you can also use the internal margins of Stack Views to help with the layout of your content. @kharrison shows you how.
useyourloaf.com
Increasing the Tap Area of a UIButton
@rolandleth with a nice tip on how to increase the tap area of a UIButton without increasing the size of the buttons frame.
rolandleth.com
Tools
Introducing Tuist
As team size increases, so do the issues of scaling your Xcode project. Tuist is a new Xcode project generation tool from @pepibumur that helps address this problem, generating your Xcode project files from an externally defined manifest file.
tuist.io
Libraries
Open sourcing swift-html: A Type-Safe Alternative to Templating Languages in Swift
When working with server-side Swift, it’s common to use templating libraries such as Stencil, Mustache, Handlebars, and Leaf. Whilst these libraries can speed up development, they’re not without their issues. @mbrandonw and @stephencelis have taken a different approach building a new HTML library written in Swift that is perfect for building HTML views for your Swift-powered websites.
pointfree.co
Resources
60+ great UI kits for iOS engineers
UIKits can save alot of time when it comes to putting your high-fidelity app designs together. To help with this, @LisaDziuba has pulled together sixty of the best.
flawlessapp.io
Videos
Apple TechTalk Videos
To accompany all the new goodies announced at the keynote this week Apple have also published a number of new tech talk videos that provide details about developing for both the Apple Watch Series 4 and the new iPhone XR/XS/XSMax. Worth checking out.
apple.com
Podcasts
Swift Over Coffee
Looking to keep your Swift knowledge up to date? Swift Over Coffee is a new podcast from @seanallen_dev and @twostraws discussing all things Swift.
anchor.fm
Finally
Run Tracking
Even with the debate about the start point, this tweet from @edwardsanchez and the subsequent thread made me laugh. ?
twitter.com
Comment
Wow, busy week! So three new iPhones, a new edition of the Apple Watch and iOS 12 now out in the wild! As I mentioned last week, for me, the Apple Watch is the device that stole the show with some great new features that I really hope get rolled out to non-US markets in the near future. As you might expect, with all the excitement this week there’s also been some great articles as well so let’s take a look at what’s been happening around the community.