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
Apple’s New Subscription Management Prompt Seems To Be Working
Over the last few years, we’ve repeatedly seen instances of shady apps peddling expensive subscriptions. Whilst Apple has been working to rein these in, iOS 13 represents a big step forward in this campaign with the inclusion of functionality that prompts users about whether they want to keep their subscription when they delete a subscription-based app. @drbarnard has been looking at what impact these changes are having.
revenuecat.com
Pros and Cons of the Mac App Store
@ctietze with an interesting look at some of the pros and cons of distributing software via the Mac App Store. As you might imagine, there are arguments for both options so make sure you read this one all the way through if you’re pondering your strategy.
christiantietze.de
Swift
Advanced iOS Memory Management with Swift: ARC, Strong, Weak and Unowned Explained
If there is one thing that regularly catches developers out with Swift it’s memory management and the differences between strong, weak and unknowned. @V8tr walks you through the differences.
vadimbulavin.com
SwiftNIO: Understanding Futures and Promises
If you’ve not come across it before, SwiftNIO is Apple non-blocking networking library that has been adopted by popular server-side Swift frameworks like Vapor and Kitura. This article @mickael gets the heart of the library, with an in-depth look at the concept of futures and promises and how they simplify the task of writing asynchronous, event-driven, code.
process-one.net
Code
SwiftUI Tutorial for Slider Control
SwiftUI lets you create some pretty advanced effects with relatively little code. In this tutorial, Martin Goldin shows you how to create a liquid swipe animation for switching between pages.
exyte.com
Common Cryptographic Operations
If last weeks link about Apple’s new CryptoKit framework piqued your interest, this week @AndyIbanezK has published a slightly more in-depth article showing you how to perform some common cryptographic operations such as hashing, key generation, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, signing and more.
andyibanez.com
Catalytic Converter
Beyond the obvious play on words in this article’s title (yes – I wish I’d thought of that one 😉), this is a really interesting article from @jamesthomson looking at just what it takes to truly convert an iOS app to macOS using Catalyst.
tla.systems
Dynamic Type in SwiftUI
Dynamic type is an almost essential feature in any modern iOS app. SwiftUI is a great help on this front with built-in support for dynamic type out of the box. Although this is a great start, some work is still required. @mecid shows you how.
github.io
Resources
SF Symbols: The Benefits and How To Use Them Guide
Introduced at WWDC 2019, Apple’s SFSymbols is a great new providing over 1500 free symbols to us to use within our apps. @twannl dives into the detail, showing you how to access symbols within your code, how to create your own custom symbols as well as some of the licensing implications of using SFSymbols in your projects.
avanderlee.com
Getting Started
Create Your First AR app with RealityKit and SwiftUI
With AR glasses rumoured in Apple’s future, now could be a great time to get up to speed with developing AR-based applications. A good place to get started is this article from Rob Sturgeon which walks you through building your first AR app using RealityKit and SwiftUI.
medium.com