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
Bad Idea Rejection Tokens
I really like this idea from @jaredsinclair. In my experience one of the most important parts of leading a team is giving team members the room and support they need to develop and grow. As a engineering lead that is a balance though and means knowing when to veto things and when to give people the freedom to experiment and try new things. This is idea is one that Jared summarises very nicely in this article.
How to Build a Brand for Your Mobile App: Strategies, Tips and Examples
With an increasingly competitive App Store, the team at @tubikstudio provide some strategies for creating a strong mobile brand – essential for making your app stand out from the crowd.
Career
My Tech Interviews Experience: Failures, Successes and Tips for You
Fresh from interviewing with some of the biggest tech companies on the planet @BalestraPatrick imparts some tips and advice to help you on your own interview journey.
Sponsored Link
New Book: Server Side Swift with Vapor
If you’re a beginner to web development, but have worked with Swift for some time, you’ll find it’s easy to create robust, fully-featured web apps and web APIs with Vapor 3.
This book starts with the basics of web development and introduces the basics of Vapor; it then walks you through creating APIs and web backends; creating and configuring databases; deploying to Vapor Cloud; testing your creations and more!
Design
Building Fluid Interfaces
The ‘Designing Fluid Interfaces’ talk from this year’s WWDC was one of the most well received talks of this years conference showing you how to create fluid, gestural interfaces on the iPhone X. The problem though was that the pseudo code included within the talk left a lot to the imagination so in this article @nathangitter attempts to bridge the gap with a review and some concrete examples of the things that were covered. You can find the corresponding source code here.
The Case for CloudKit
When it comes to backend services for mobile applications, there are a wide range of options. The dominant framework in the market is Google’s Firebase, but on iOS, CloudKit can, and often is, a great option. In this article, @andrewcbancroft puts forward the case of why you might want to look at using CloudKit over one of the other backend services.
Code
Refactoring Massive App Delegate
Massive View Controllers are a common problem in many iOS apps and over the years there have been a wide variety of articles showing you how to combat them. Your app delegate however can suffer similar symptoms and with this in mind @V8tr has a number of tips and patterns that you can use to keep the size of your app delegate to a minimum.
SpriteKit: Shaders and Geometry
A great article from @hmblebee on how to use SpriteKit’s SKShader and SKWarpGeometry to create some advanced visual effects in your SpriteKit apps and games.
Libraries
DifferenceKit
Wanting to find the differences between two Swift collections? DifferenceKit by @ra1028fe5, is a fast, flexible, O(n) diffing framework for calculating the differences between two Swift collections.
SwiftEntryKit
Taking the pain out of pop-ups and notifications, SwiftEntryKit by Daniel Huri is Daniel Huri is a highly configurable banner library for easily displaying pop-ups and notification within your iOS applications.
Videos
Technical Debt Isn’t Technical
You’ll have no doubt come across the term ‘technical debt’ but is technical debt really technical? In this talk, @einarwh examines this concept and proposes the idea that we can’t solve the problem of technical debt with virtuous coding alone.
vimeo.com
Instruments Workshop
In this online workshop, @e_zwart shows you how to use Instruments to identify, and then fix, critical performance bottlenecks within your apps.
Other
Finding Local Destinations with Siri’s Regionally Specific Language Models for Speech Recognition
An interesting peek behind the scenes of some of the improvements that have been made to Siri’s recognition of local named entities such as business or other local points of interest through the use of geographically localized machine learning models. Nice idea.
apple.com
Comment
And here we are – Issue 146! It’s been another good week this week. Fresh from their new site design, we’ve got the team at @rwenderlich back as a sponsor (their new site design is great by the way and definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already) and it’s also been a great week for links with a whole host of them to choose from. With this in mind let’s cut the pre-amble and get right to them. Enjoy and have a great week.