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
Fed Up With Apple’s Policies, App Developers Form a ‘Union’
There has always been tension between Apple and developers trying to make their living in the app store. With Apple owning, operating and setting the rules for the store, developers have had very little recourse, with long-standing arguments for better App Store policies often receiving little or no response from Apple. Now, a small group of developers are trying to change this by forming The Developers Union – a community-driven organisation advocating for greater sustainability for developers trying to make a living within the store.
theverge.com
Design
Privacy: A Quick Overview for App Designers
With Friday marking the first day of new the GDPR laws here in Europe, @brianpagan provides some useful tips on how to approach privacy within your apps including how to ask for consent, how to handle sensitive data and how to comply with a users right to be forgotten.
prototypr.io
Code
Natural Language Processing on iOS with Turi Create
CoreML has opened up a wide range of new opportunities for incorporating machine learning into your apps. In this tutorial @TheMikeKatz shows you how to uses Turi Create to train own CoreML model from scratch and then how to combine that with the Natural Language Processing capabilities of the iOS SDK to perform CoreML driven classification of text-based inputs.
raywenderlich.com
Type-safe Identifiers in Swift
Identity is a key part of working with objects and values in code whether it be retrieving objects from a database, storing them in a cache or searching for matches. So how do we implement the concept of identity within Swift in a type safe manner? @johnsundell takes a look.
swiftbysundell.com
Tools
Running Xcode Playgrounds on Travis CI
We all know that adding your Xcode projects to a CI environment such as Travis is a great way to quickly catch new issues in your code base but what about setting the code in your Playground files? @mattt digs into the Playground file structure and with a bit of careful scripting, shows you how to get your Playground file compiling under Travis CI.
flight.school
Tips for using Xcode Playgrounds
Xcode Playgrounds are a great way to experiment with code and try out different ideas but they aren’t without their issues with delays in auto-execution and regular crashes. @soulchildpls provides some useful tips on how to work around these issues along with some tips on how to make working with Playgrounds an altogether more pleasant experience.
fluffy.es
Testing
The iOS Testing Manifesto
It’s difficult to argue with the huge advantages that unit tests can bring to your code base. Higher quality code, improved designs, reduced debug time, executable documentation – the list goes on. Eager to help you tap into some of these benefits, @_hsalman has put together the iOS Testing Manifesto – an extensive guide to iOS testing covering everything from unit testing and TDD to Mocks, Dependency Injection, Mock objects and more.
medium.com
Other
You’re Missing Out on a Better Mac Terminal Experience
As an Apple developer it’s likely you’ll be familier with the macOS terminal app but why stick with the basics? With a little work and this guide from @caulfieldOwen the plain old terminal can become so much more…
medium.com
Videos
UIConf 2018
UIConf 2018 only happened last week but pretty amazingly, the videos have already been edited and posted. Some great talks in here that merit carving out some time in your week to watch.
youtube.com
Craft Conference 2018
Not 100% iOS related but the videos for last weeks Craft Conference 2018 have now been posted covering a whole range of topics in software development as a whole. I’ve been dipping in and out of some of these this week including watching this one from @gregheo and so far all of them – including Greg’s have been great!
craft-conf.com
Blockchain Programming in Swift
@azamsharp discusses blockchain programming including the principles behind the Blockchain technology, the problems it can be applied to and how to implement a your own simple blockchain in Swift.
usergroup.tv
Comment
Welcome to this weeks issue of Swift Developments! You might notice that things look at little different this week. After input from a couple of readers, I’ve been doing a bit of tinkering to try and improve some of the layout and readability aspects of Swift Developments on different platforms. Hopefully, I’ve made things a little better but as ever let me know what you think! ?