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
Apple Special Event – December 2nd
One of the surprises this week has been the announcement of an Apple Special Event to highlight some of Apple’s favourite apps and games of 2019. Scheduled for December 2nd in NYC, this will be the first time Apple has held an event dedicated to apps and games which might mean a new direction for events like the Apple Design Awards which are traditionally held at WWDC every year. Either way it’s going to be interesting to tune in and as ever it’s always good to see Apple celebrating the App Stores best and brightest.
9to5mac.com
Design
What a Designer Needs to Know About iOS Dark Mode When Working With a Developer
Communication is an important part of creating a high-performing development team but due to their different backgrounds and different skill sets, there can sometimes be communication gaps between designers and developers. This article from @Lee_Kah_Seng helps to close that gap, providing a useful guide to iOS 13’s Dark Mode for both designer and developer alike.
medium.com
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raywenderlich.com
Code
Debugging with Swift Combine Framework
Due to its functional reactive nature, debugging techniques such as setting breakpoints and examining stack traces often don’t help when debugging your Combine code. Instead, @V8tr explores some different debugging approaches like marble diagrams, generating breakpoints via code and the good old printing to the console.
vadimbulavin.com
Simple Semantic Image Segmentation in an iOS Application – DeepLabV3 Implementation
Interesting article from @omarmhaimdat introducing the concept of Image Segmentation – a vision processing technique for partitioning images into regions in order to extract the different objects within the image. I learnt quite a bit from this one.
fritz.ai
SwiftUI
How to Create Fun Animations in SwiftUI
One of the great things about SwiftUI is how easy it makes creating custom animations for your UIs. This article from @fermoya is a perfect example, showing you how to create and animate a stack of bank cards.
medium.com
Safely Updating the View State
Great article from @SwiftUILab covering some of the subtleties of trying to update your SwiftUI view state from within its body. Worth reading if you’re getting up to speed with SwiftUI.
swiftui-lab.com
Tools
Intercepting Network Traffic with mitmproxy
When building iOS apps, it’s not uncommon to make requests to a back-end JSON-based web services. A useful technique for diagnosing issues with these calls is to use proxy to intercept your network traffic in order to study what is *actually* being sent and received over the air. @AndyIbanezK explores one approach to this using mitmproxy a free and open-source command-line utility to intercept the network traffic that enters and leaves your device.
andyibanez.com
Xcode 11 Git Stashing
Like @kharrison I’ve never really been a big user of Xcode’s version control features preferring instead to use either the command line or an external client like Tower. Having read this article – it might be time to take another look at Xcode.
useyourloaf.com
Thread Sanitizer Explained: Data Races in Swift
Flaky tests? Weird crashes? Make sure you check out this article from @twannl that dives into Xcode’s Thread Sanitizer – a powerful Xcode feature for auditing potential threading issues within your Swift and C code.
avanderlee.com
Videos
DIY App Store Videos
So you’ve put the final touches to your app and need to get your app up in the store. But what about those pesky App Store promo videos that you need to create? Mike Monaghanh has some useful tips on how to plan them, create them and get the most from your time investment.
youtu.be
Using and Creating Property Wrappers
In this Swift Language User Group talk, @timroesner takes a look at Swift 5.1’s support for property wrappers discussing what they are, where you should use them and how to create wrappers of your own.
youtu.be