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
Sketch App: 10 New Enhancements that Will Make You Giddy
I’m a big fan of Sketch as a general purpose image editor but it’s also a great for app design. This week has seen the publication of nice article by @mrdanielschwarz highlighting some of the new features and benefits in Sketch 3.4.x.
sitepoint.com
Code
The Essentials of Arrays in Swift
It’s always important to have a solid understanding of the fundamentals of Swift and this week I posted the first of a sequence of posts looking at Swifts collection types. This weeks post covered Swift Arrays so make sure you check it out.
andybargh.com
Tools
2015 LLVM Developers’ Meeting
The end of last week saw the release of the accompanying video for the 2015 LLVM Developers Meeting which took a look into the Swift Intermediate Language. It’s a bit in depth but a good watch and gives you a much better understanding of how the LLVM compiler works.youtube.com
Installing Xcode Plugins Using Fastlane
I’ve spent a lot of time this week playing with Fastlane as I’ve been setting it up for one of our projects and I admit I’m turning into a bit of a fan. One article I did come across as I was poking around the web though was this one by @mokagio which extended my thinking any using it to also install plugins into Xcode. Neat.
mokacoding.com
Videos
Anastasia Kazakova: What Does It Take To Maintain a High Quality iOS Code?
As I mentioned last week, #Pragma Conference 2015 continue to release some of the videos from the conference. In this one, Anastasia Kazakova takes a look at just what it takes to maintain a clean, high-quality code base.
youtube.com
Ash Furrow: Emerging Best Practices in Swift
The team at Realm continue to do a great job releasing some extremely useful videos for the community. This one sees Ash Furrow looking at some of the emerging best practices in Swift.
realm.io
App Store
A Tale of Two Certs
Last week saw the Mac App Store was having some serious issues with Mac apps downloaded from the store reporting themselves as corrupt. Although Apple initially blamed the app developers it seems the issue boiled down to expired certificates on Apple’s part. Checkout to the post from @rbrockerhoff who has a good rundown of exactly what happened.
brockerhoff.net
6 Tips to Get You Started with App Store Optimisation
Whilst we’re on the subject of App Stores, I also came across this article this week which provides some useful tips on how to optimise your apps listing within the App Store. Worth taking a look at if you are publishing apps of your own.
onemonth.com
Other
Apple Shuts the Side-Loading Door on f.lux
An interesting week for f.lux. Having mentioned it in my last newsletter, it appears that Apple took a disliking to the loophole that was being used to side-load f.lux on non-jailbroken devices. In hindsight I probably agree with Apples stance as we don’t want things deteriorating into the wild west but it remains an interesting question about what the difference is between the mechanism they were using and distributing projects on somewhere like github.
justgetflux.com
Comment
So, it’s back in the saddle this week after a few days away and it sounds like the overriding response to the new iPad Pro is: “It’s huge!”.
Many have heralded it as the first viable alternative to carrying a laptop around with them but it’ll be interesting to see whether it really affects the way people work. I’m yet to play with one myself but from the videos I’ve seen there appears to be very little lag which should make it ideal for the digital artists amongst us as well as making it one of the first mobile platform to sensibly support handwriting. Only time will tell….
Anyway, in the mean time the show must go on so lets dive into what has been going on around the iOS development community this week…