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
Tapity Looking to Sell Grades and Languages
An interesting story appeared on Medium last week from @jerols. Looks like Tapity are looking to sell two of their apps, the Apple Design Award winning Grades and Languages their app that was featured in Apple’s Best of 2012. The main interest for me from this story was not the fact that they are selling the code base and associated assets, but more the associated stats that they provide in the article. One thing it highlighted for me was not only how much effort went into the app but also just how much the code base for a top-rated app is worth.
medium.com
Just Getting Started
What Hardware Do You Need to Develop iOS Apps?
In this article, I try to address one of the major questions that I get asked from people just starting out with iOS development – What Hardware Do You Need to Develop iOS Apps?
andybargh.com
The Swift Numeric Data Types
This week also saw a continuation of our tour through the Swift language. In this post, we take a deep dive into the numeric data types that are available in Swift.
andybargh.com
Business
Market Your iOS App Now
With the ever-growing list of apps in the app-store, marketing your app is more important than ever. This article provides a good idea of some of the steps involved.
medium.com
Design
Identifying Your App’s Unique Selling Position
One of the key things about when designing an app is understanding how to make your app stand out from the competition. This article provides a good overview of some of the initial steps you should be going through when first fleshing out your app idea.
medium.com
Code
One Language to Rule Them All
With the end of the year approaching, excitement is growing about the whether Apple will stay true to their word and release Swift as an open source language. In preparation, the team over at perfect.org have released Perfect, a library to help with writing server-side Swift, including support for developing features such as web and REST services.
perfect.org
UITouchType.Stylus
With the Apple Pencil finally appearing in the shops, @xenadu02 continues his exploration into what is and isn’t possible with Apples new replacement for the finger.
russbishop.net
iOS Unit Testing: Dependency Injection with Structs in Swift
Although Unit Testing does seem to be a bit of the black sheep in the iOS community, it is none-the-less, critically important to delivering high-quality, reliable apps and one of the critical memes in Unit Testing is that of dependency injection. In this article @NatashaTheRobot takes a look at using dependency injection in conjunction with Swift structs.
natashatherobot.com
Tools
Silver Flows
I’m always on the lookout for new and better tools to help with my app development workflow. This week I came across this tool, Silver Flows, which promises the ability to build lightweight mobile prototypes directly from Sketch. It’s definitely something I’ll be keeping an eye on.
silverflows.com
Fastlane
As I mentioned, I’ve spent a chunk of time this week playing with Fastlane and it appears to be going from strength to strength. If you’ve not come across it yet, this week saw the release of this video from Cocoaheads Stockholm where @KrauseFX presents an overview of the toolchain itself along with a bit of a demo. In addition, @sbambra over on RayWenderlich.com and @subdigital on his own website have both released tutorials on various aspects of the tool. I’d seriously recommend checking them out.
fastlane.tools
Libraries
SwiftFoundation
Continuing with the theme of Apple releasing a platform independent implementation of Swift, this library of code, specifically designed to complement that of the Swift standard library may play see a significant increase in popularity in the coming weeks.
github.com
Videos
Artsy’s Emergence Full Code Review
I must have missed this when it first came out. In this video @orta run through a full code review of Emergence, their new Apple TV app. It’s interesting viewing and provides an insight into some of the thinking behind the design decisions that they made.
github.io
GPX Data in the Simulator
Realm continue to churn out great developer videos. In this one, Josh Adams takes us through some techniques for extracting location data for using during debugging.
realm.io
Finally
RayWenderlich.com – Our 1000th Tutorial
A big congratulations goes out to the team at RayWenderlich.com on reaching their 1000th tutorial. It’s an impressive feat and one that only took them 4.5 years to complete. My my maths that means an average of 2 tutorials every 3 days. Something I’ll aspire to!
raywenderlich.com
Comment
Firstly, Happy Thanks Giving to you if you’re celebrating!
Being in the UK, I’m not lucky enough to have some time off, so this week has been a week of setting up new CI systems along with a toolchain for automated app version numbering, builds, screenshots and app submissions. I’ll mention it later, but alot of this has involved getting down and dirty with Fastlane, the build toolchain from @KrausFX which I’m loving. It makes life sooooo much easier than fighting with xcodebuild…
Anyway, this week in the Apple community has been relatively quite though there have been a few interesting articles that have surfaced….