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
A Best in Class iOS App
What is it that makes an app great? What elevates an app to the level where it’s a coveted Apple Design Award? @jordanmorgan10 has been giving this question some thought and has published a list of some of his ideas about what makes great apps ‘great’.
swiftjectivec.com
10-Step Checklist To Build a Great Search
For many apps, search and discovery plays a major part in the overall app user experience. In this article, @abiaad provides a 10-step checklist for things to think about when incorporating your own search feature.
medium.com
Sponsored Link
New Book: Server Side Swift with Kitura
This new book from the team at raywenderlich.com shows you how to harness the power of Kitura to create and deploy production-ready RESTful APIs written in Swift. Coupled with the power of Docker and Kubernetes, and KueryORM and KituraStencil to pull it all together, you’ll learn how to use Kitura to take your Swift skills to the server and beyond!
raywenderlich.com
Swift
Pitch: an Official Style Guide and Formatter for Swift
There’s been a lot of talk this week about this proposal from @allevato on the Swift Evolution forums. From my perspective I think it’s a good thing in the long-term but for me, the question is about the timing. Having written a fair amount of Go in my time, I seen and experienced how having a standardised code style, supplemented by in-built formatting tools goes along way toward removing the topic of coding style from code reviews and helps developers when faced with new and unfamiliar code. With that said, given the current maturity of the Swift language, the variety of other features yet to be implemented and the fact that we already have some great community-based tools such as SwiftFormat my gut feeling is that the communities collective effort may be better placed in other areas at this point. But hey, that’s just me. It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out.
swift.org
Code
UIView Styling With Functions
@PierreFelgines makes use of generics and protocols to brings some functional goodness to the topic of UIView styling. Nice approach. ?
github.io
Make Draggable UIViewController with Swipe Cards Using Custom Transitions in iOS
In this tutorial @Kharauzov shows you how to make use of UIKit’s custom transition classes to create a draggable, gesture-driven user interface for your app.
medium.com
iOS Responder Chain: UIResponder, UIEvent, UIControl and Uses
The responder chain is something that you constantly deal with when developing iOS apps but rarely interact with directly. In this article, @rockthebruno takes a look behind the scenes and lifts the lid on how touch-handling works on iOS.
swiftrocks.com
Tools
CocoaPods 1.7.0 Beta
This week, dnkoutso announced the publication of the first beta of CocoaPods 1.7.0. The new release brings a bunch of new features including support for multiple Swift versions, multi-Xcodeproj generation, incremental installation of new pod targets (rather than re-generating your entire workspace each time) and a whole lot more. Good to see development continuing to push ahead.
cocoapods.org
Libraries
SmartLookContentSDK for iOS
As a developer, it’s your responsibility to gain explicit user consent before gathering analytics or processing your users personal data within your app. Whilst presenting a simple dialog box to ask for consent and storing away the users answer may seem simple on the face of it, there a a number of things to consider and invariable things can end up feeling a little klunky. With this in mind, the team at @getSmartlook have published a configurable consent SDK for use within your apps that helps streamline the process of presenting and storing user privacy options.
github.com
Podcasts
“Pragmatic Priorities” with Special Guest Ted Kremenek
@tkremenek, Manager of the Languages and Runtime team at Apple has joined @johnsundell on the @swiftbysundell podcast this week to talk Swift 5, Strings, ABI stability and more. An interesting discussion.
swiftbysundell.com
Videos
Understanding Artificial Neural Networks
If you’re new to the world of machine learning and are looking to get up the learning curve with some of the background theory, look no further than this @cocoaheadsnl talk from @nvh which provides a great introduction to the subject and walks you through building your own simple neural network from scratch.
youtube.com
ServerSide.swift
Adding to the growing popularity of Server-Side Swift, this week saw the team at @SwiftServerConf publishing the full set of videos from this years ServerSide.swift conference for your viewing pleasure. Now I’ve just got to find time to watch them all!
serversideswift.info