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
WWDC
It’s that time of year again, the WWDC lottery is now open! In line with expectations, Apple this week announced that this years WWDC event will be returning for a second year at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California with this years event running between 4-8 June. As last year, tickets are being sold by random selection with registration open until this Thursday (the 22nd) at 10:00am PDT so make sure you register now to get your name into the draw if you’re warning to go. On top of this if you ARE planning on being in San Jose area during that week and aren’t lucky enough to get a WWDC ticket (or maybe even if you are), AltConf is also going to be returning as free, community-driven alternative to Apple’s WWDC event. Check out the link for more details.
apple.com
Business
10 App Marketing Tips to Boost Your App’s Launch Success
With months focusing on designing, building, polishing and testing your app, it’s all too easy to focus on the development aspsects and neglect the marketing and promotion activities that are essential to a successful app launch. With this in mind, @kenyarmosh has put together 10 app marketing tips to help boost the chances of success for your next app launch.
savvyapps.com
Has iOS 11 really affected star ratings?
With the introduction of the re-vamped app store in iOS 11 along with enhanced app previews, the abilitiy to prompts users for a reviews and the ability for developers to respond to reviews via the store, @christiehunter investigates whether these changes have had any appreciable impact on the star ratings received by apps within the store and looks to see whether there are any lessons to be learnt.
appbot.co
Swift
Size, Stride, Alignment
Most of the time when working in Swift, you won’t need to worry about the underlying memory layout of your collection types but as you move down to lower-level APIs or start interacting with C code, the underlying memory considerations become increasingly important. @gregheo takes a look at three important concepts when it comes to the memory layout of Swift collection types: size, stride and alignment and provides some useful tips on how to find out more information using Swift’s MemoryLayout class.
swiftunboxed.com
Do you often forget [weak self]? – Here’s a solution
Creating unintended retain cycles when using closures as callbacks is all to easy, after all we’re all human and remembering to write [weak self] everywhere is just too easy to forget. However, @olegdreyman has a nice technique using the power of Swift’s type system and generics that might save you from some of this pain.
medium.com
Code
A µTutorial on Swift NIO
With Apple’s new Swift NIO framework released a little less than a month ago and rapidly growing in poularity @helje5 has written a great introduction to the new framework showing you how to build an Express.js-like micro framework in around 350 lines of code!
alwaysrightinstitute.com
Tools
Advanced Debugging with Xcode
Xcode’s debugger is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal for tracking down those pesky bugs and understanding how to use it well can save countless hours in head scratching and rebuilding your code. In this article @v_pradeilles walks you through some of Xcode’s more powerful debugging features including contitional breakpoints, watchpoints and more.
medium.com
Community
Best iOS hacks from Twitter: January and February Edition
@LisaDziuba is back with a roundup of January and February’s best tips, tricks and advice from the iOS community on Twitter. There’s some gems in here so it’s definitely worth having a look through.
medium.com
Videos
Practicing with Pointers
In this, the latest public episode of Swift Talk, @chriseidhof and @floriankugler dig into the lower levels of Swift, with a look at how to use C functions and Swift’s pointer classes to read and process the contents of a file. Great stuff!
objc.io
Representables in Swift
In this talk, Vapor cofounder @LogMaestro discusses ‘Representables’ – an approach for API design that lets you build flexible public APIs without sacrificing the control of your internal implementation.
youtube.com