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
Upload App Previews with Transporter
Uploading app previews to iTunes connect has never been a particuarly smooth experience but this week has seen Apple making a bit of progress in this area with some updates to their command line delivery tool – Transporter – to add the ability to deliver app previews to iTunes connect. Check the documentation for all the new details.
apple.com
Business
Castro 3’s Business Model
In this episode of the Supertop Podcast, @padraig and @prendio2 discuss the different options for the Castro 3’s business model as well as their reasoning for choosing a different business model going forward. It’s an interesting insight into the mindset of many indie developers looking to create a sustainable business model for the future.
castro.fm
Nobody’s Buying Anything In Your App? Here’s What To Do Next
It’s a problem faced by may developer trying to make a living in the app store – you’ve cranked up your marketing engine and users are downloading your app but they aren’t buying any of your in-app purchases. Faced with this problem, what options do you have for breaking this sales drought? @mr_markmcdonald provides seven options to consider.
medium.com
Design
Why Your Apps Look Better in Sketch
Ever thought that your app design looks better in Sketch than it does once implemented? @nathangitter thought the same and has done an in-depth analysis of the rendering differences between Sketch and iOS and provides some useful tips on how to minimise the differences.
medium.com
Make me think!
With apps, and technology in general, become increasingly complex one of the key skills in modern UX design is the ability to hide this complexity from the end user. But what price do we pay for this simplification? @ralphammer explores the line between simplicity and complexity in UX design.
Swift
Writing Declarative Code Using Result Extensions
@tyroneavnit extends the commonly used Result type to add a new composable, declarative API that makes chaining together results as simple boolean AND and OR operations much cleaner. Very nice.
medium.com
Parallel Programming with Swift: Operations
@olbrich_jan continues with his ongoing introduction to parallel programming in Swift by looking at Cocoa’s high-level concurrency abstractions – Operations and Operation Queues.
medium.com
Code
Five Steps to Auto Layout Heaven
Love it or hate it, Auto Layout is here to stay and in this article, @vasarhelyia provides five important tips for making working with this powerful, yet sometimes frustrating, layout engine easier.
github.io
Genetic Algorithms in Swift: Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem
@dagostin goes all Darwin (no not that Darwin…) with an interesting use of genetic algorithms to solve the well known computer science problem of the Travelling Salesman. A nice introduction to genetic algorithms if you’ve never played with them and even better – it’s all in Swift!
agostini.tech
Tools
Keeping Secrets Out of Git in Your iOS App
Private values such as API keys or passwords form a part of almost every Xcode project but including these values within your git repo means that they are visible to anyone who has access to the source code – a real problem if that project is also open-source. @andrewlord1990 outlines a nice workaround that can help you seperate these values from the rest of your project.
medium.com
iOS Development Tools Checklist – Project Work Made Easy
Building yourself a complementary suite of development tools for your project can make life as a iOS developer significantly easier. If you’ve new to iOS development or are looking to improve your existing workflow, @jussisuojanen has written a nice roundup of some some tools you might consider.
swiftyjimmy.com
Libraries
Deep Dive into Swift Frameworks
Frameworks are an important part of Swift and iOS development but how much do you know about how they work? @theswiftdev takes a deep dive into the terminology and tooling.
theswiftdev.com
Binary Frameworks in Swift
ABI stability has been a goal on the Swift roadmap for the last 3 years but with it now declared as a hard release goal for Swift 5, steipete explores what it is and why it matters.
pspdfkit.com
Videos
Server-Side Swift from Scratch
A great talk from @mbrandonw in which he takes a functional approach to server-side Swift, building up URL request handling from small composable units that can be glued together to transform the URL request into a URL response. It’s a nice walkthrough and many of the ideas provide the basis of Brandon’s new collaboration with @stephencelis called Point-Free a new Swift functional programming site and weekly video series that is worth checking out if you haven’t already.
skilled.io
Creating Refactoring Transformations for Swift
In this talk, Swift toolsmith and Apple engineer @xge_apple looks at the state of refactoring in Swift, including the support for refactoring that was introduced in Xcode 9, how to create your own Swift refactorings and how Swift’s tooling infrastructure is shaping up to support additional refactoring operations in the future.
skilled.io