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
Ulysses Moves to a Subscription Model
In an interesting development this week, @macguru17 has announced that @the_soulmen are moving to a new subscription model with the latest release of their award winning writing app @ulyssesapp. Putting aside the Ulysses transition specifically (I’m a big fan by the way and use it for almost all of my writing) – the accompanying blog post provides some great insights into some of the challenges of building a sustainable software product.
medium.com
Design
How to Make a Physiology-Friendly Application for the iPad
If you’ve used an iPad for any length of time, you’ll be acutely aware that they are very different beasts from developing for an iPhone. With their increased screen real-estate, iPad introduce a range of issues that you just don’t see when developing for an iPhone. So what does it take to develop a physiology-friendly app for the iPad? @uxksu and the team at @mailru investigate.
uxplanet.org
Mobile Typography: 8 Steps Toward Powerful UI
@tubikstudio outline the essential principles, useful tips and best design best-practices for creating compelling typography in your mobile app designs.
tubikstudio.com
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Swift
Swift 5 Begins
With the proposal period for Swift 4 now complete, the attention of the Swift.org project has this week turned to Swift 5 with @tkremenek announcing some changes to the Swift Evolution rules and providing some detail about the highlevel goals of Swift 5. If you’ve been following Swift’s evolution it won’t suprise you – ABI stability is numero uno on the priority list.
swift.org
Shuffling an Array in Swift
Every day I’m shufflin’. @reinder42 some of the different algorithms that you can use to shuffle the contents of an array as well as some of the performance implications of each approach.
learnappmaking.com
Type Erasure in Swift
Although Swift’s strong typing provides some major benefits to the Swift language it can also cause some problems when working with protocols that have associated types. In this article, @chris_dus shows you how to use type erasure to work these problems.
slacktime.org
Code
How To Integrate Google Street View into Your iOS Apps
Bringing a first-person perspective to your map applications, the team at @appcodamobile show how to integrate the Google Maps SDK into your apps to provide a Google Streetview perspective .
appcoda.com
Server-Side
Server Side Swift for Laravel Developers
In this three-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) @janostlund take you through the basics of Vapor, from getting everything installed to creating your first server-side Swift project. The series is targetted at Laravel developers but has a lot of good content if you’re just getting started.
eastwest.se
Tools
5 Tips for Integrating SwiftLint Into your CI/CD Pipeline
SwiftLint from the team at @Realm is an extremely useful tool for enforcing Swift style and conventions in your code bases. However, you can also take some of this code consistency goodness and also integrate it into your CI/CD pipelines as well. @Shashikant86 provides 5 tips for doing just that.
shashikantjagtap.net
Libraries
UIDevice
UIDevice extensions from @din0sr aimed at filling in some of the missing functionality on UIDevice such as the ability to detect the specific device type and get the device family.
github.com
FAPanels
A fully customisable panel library from Fahid Attique supporting left, right and center panels along with a whole bunch of transitions.
github.com
FlagKit 2.0
FlagKit 2.0 by is a useful SVG and PNG asset library from the team at Bowtie and inclues the flags from over 250 countries from around the world. Ideal for those ‘name that flag’ quiz apps. ?
github.com
Testing
Reducing Flakiness In Swift Tests
Your test suite is your saftey net, the warning system that tells you if you’ve unwittingly introduced a bug into your code base and also that your code is doing what you expect. However, like the boy who cried wolf, if your test suite is flakey, you’ll soon start ignoring the test failures and lose much of the benefit that that it can provide. @johnsundell looks at some easy-to-apply tips for improving the reliability of your tests.
swiftbysundell.com
Videos
Your Product Needs a Vision, Not a Feature
In this talk from AltConf 2017, @graiz talks about how having a clear vision and direction for your product can can be the magic ingredient you need to transform your app from a lose collection of features into a single cohesive whole.
realm.io