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
The Ultimate Guide to App Monitization – How To, Stats and Insight
If you’re looking for ways to monitize your app, look no further than this post from the team at @tamocotech. It’s a comprehensive review of a wide range of app monetization strategies that you could choose for your app and is a great place to start if you’re looking for new ideas. Just remember though, every app is different so in true growth-hacker style, pick a few, try them out and see what works.
tamoco.com
Design
Best Practices for Mobile App Navigation: The Basics
Navigation plays an important part in nearly every app we create. In this article, the team at @inapptics look at some common navigation design best practices and discuss some of usability considerations to think about when designing the navigation flows within your own apps.
uxplanet.org
Swift
Superpowered Sequences
@JLHLonline takes a deep dive into Swift’s Sequence protocol, extending the sequence operations such as map and filter so they return Sequences instead of Arrays and updating things so they work with different underlying container types. Provides a good insight into how sequences work in Swift.
medium.com
How to Use Dynamic Member Lookup in Swift
Wanting a glimpse into the future of Swift? After a significant amount of discussion, the recent acceptance of Swift Evolution proposal SE-0195 has opened the door for interoperability with more dynamic languages such as Python, Javascript and Ruby by adding the ability to look up and resolve arbitrary names at runtime in a completely type-safe manner. Although unlikely to be baked into the language until Swift 5, the pull request submitted along with the review means that we can already take this new feature for a spin. @twostraws has been putting it though it’s paces.
hackingwithswift.com
Code
Leveraging Machine Learning in iOS for Improved Accessibility
Building accessibility into your app covers a whole range of app design topics including captions and audio descriptions, VoiceOver and Speech support, display customisation and more. But have you ever thought about using CoreML? I have to admit, I hadn’t until I saw this article from @JordanMorgan10 in which he explains how he and his colleagues at @buffer have been using CoreML to recognize the images that people have been posting and then using that information to automatically add alt-text fields to those images to improve accessibility. Nice idea.
buffer.com
Tools
How To Run Your Application in Swift Playground
For many, Swift Playgrounds have been a productivity revelation letting you immediately see the results of the code you write and making them an ideal place to prototype new interfaces and experiment with code. But what about buildng on this idea to run more of your app with a playground? @jussisuojanen shows you how.
swiftyjimmy.com
Libraries
Trusting Third Party SDKs
@KrauseFx with a sobering reminder that each and every third-party library that you include within your app opens you up to potential security threat and as a developer it’s your responsibility to make sure you only ship code you trust. A must-read for everyone I think.
krausefx.com
Videos
Naming is Hard: Get the Metaphor Right
“There are two hard things in computer science – cache invalidation and naming things.” ~ Phil Karlton. This quote is as true now as it has ever been. @olofhellman talks about the importance of choosing good metaphores and good names within your code.
vimeo.com
Object-Oriented Programming in Functional Programming in Swift
One of Swift’s big advantages as a language is it’s ability to support ideas from both object-oriented and functional programming. Rather than being mutually exclusive, we have the luxury of being able to use ideas from both of these paradigms within a single code base. In this talk, @iwasleeg explores this idea, looking at the similarities between the Object-Oriented and Functional programming and illustrating how in some cases the two approaches aren’t all that different.
dotconferences.com
Resources
30 Great UI Design Kits for iOS Engineers
UI Design Kits can provide a signficant productivity boost by providing you with all the screens and UI components you’ll need to rapidly translate your wireframe sketches into a high-fidelity mockups. Many of these kits are also free and to save you from having to hunt around to find them @LisaDziuba has brought together 30 of the best.
medium.com