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
Arrival of the iPad Pro
So the big news on the hardware front this week is the availability of the new
iPad Pro for order and pickup in stores. The screen looks stunning but if you’re wanting to get hold of one yourself you’d better be feeling flush as even the bottom end WiFi model is around £679 GBP / $799 USD and prices increase from there. Add to that the Smart Keyboard ($169 / £139) and Apple Pencil ($99 / £79) you’re heading into low-end Macbook territory so you’d better start saving. With that said, the iPad Pro provides us developers new opportunities (and challenges) for developing apps to take advantage of this huge and beautiful new screen so get your thinking caps on.
apple.com
Code
Why is Swift’s String API So Hard?
Dive into unicode and strings with another great post from @mikeash, this time on the complexities of Swift’s String API. After reading this post you should have a much better understanding of how the String API works in Swift.
mikeash.com
Mixins over Inheritance
A look at how use of Swifts protocol extensions rather than inheritance to provide a much more flexible mechanism to share functionality between classes.
github.io
Threat Safety Basics on iOS/OSX
Concurrency is always an important issue for making your apps responsive and I’m sure it will be something I will touch on in the blog at some time in the future. In the mean time, here is a great introduction from the team over at Parse.
parse.com
Libraries
Unbox
There’s a lot of people at the moment who are trying to solve the problem of how to cleanly encode and decode JSON using Swift. This library from @johnsundell solves quite a nice solution.
github.com
Dropbox API v2
From Dropbox perspective, Swift is obviously *the* way forward. In a bold move, the Dropbox team have just released v2 of their API but this time have only provided support for Swift. Is this another sign that Objective-C is being left by the roadside?
dropbox.com
Tools
Apple Tools
It’s been a big week for Apple with new beta versions of Xcode, iOS, OSX and tvOS along with an increase in the number of beta testers we can invite in TestFlight. Best check out their news feed if your living on the bleeding edge.
apple.com
Shoot the Heap – Leaks is a Filthy Liar
Interesting article from @xenadu02 highlighting the trials and tribulations of trying to track a memory leak down using Instruments.
russbishop.net
Conferences
tvOS Tech Talks
Apple have been busy this week. Not only have they announced new betas but they have also announced the return of their Developer Videos. This round they’re specifically focused on the AppleTV. If you want to attend in person though you’ll have to be quick, registration closes on November 13th.
apple.com
Videos
Loosely Held Strong Convictions
A good talk from @ashfurrow at #Pragma Conference 2015 with some pointers to help you decide what is and isn’t sensible in the growing volume of Swift information that is out there.
YouTube.com
NSSpain
If you missed it, NSSpain has been gradually releasing the videos from their latest conference. The Let’s Play: Refactor the Mega-Controller talk from @andy_matuschak is a must watch.
vimeo.com
Other
Side Loading f.lux on iOS with Xcode 7
I’ve only ever used f.lux on my Mac to help my eyes during those late-night coding sessions and for that it is great. Good news this week though is that we now have the ability to side-load f.lux on non-jailbroken iOS Devices as well.
justgetflux.com
Comment
A quiet week from me with a few days away with the family. Normal service will be resumed next week though as I’ve been working on a bit of an epic post on Optionals in Swift which I’ll be putting up on the site soon so look out for it.
In the mean time, things in iOS land don’t stop and we’ve had a pretty busy week….