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
How to Reply to iOS and Google Play Reviews Like a Pro — 13 Power Tips You Should Always Keep In Mind
App reviews have always been a big part of marketing and promoting an app and with the app store now supporting the ability for developers to respond to user reviews directly the team at @appfigures have put together 13 tips and best practices for how to approach, and handle, user reviews (both good and bad).
appfigures.com
Design
Interaction Design: 7 Basic Types of UI Animation
Animation is an increasingly essential part of any app design. In this article, @myalanska looks at some of the most common places animation can be used as well as the influence animation can have on the user experience. Added to that the article also includes some great examples of animation in practice – always good for stimulating the imagination. ?
icons8.com
Swift
Trimming Long Argument Lists in Swift
Another interesting article from @johnsundell. In this one, John looks at some techniques for curbing the growth in argument lists that can often occur when modifying and extending existing code. A lot of the advice John provides is equally applicable for any new Swift code you’re writing as well so it’s worth a read.
swiftbysundell.com
RFC: Making Swift.org a More Valuable Resource for the Swift Community
The Swift.org website is already a great resource for material relating to the Swift language but I think everyone would agree that there is still room for improvement. In preparation for opening the site up to contributions from the wider Swift community, @tkremenek has this week posted a request for comment on how the Swift.org website could be improved to better server the Swift community. Now’s your chance if you have any ideas.
swift.org
Code
ARKit 2.0: Saving and Restoring World-Mapping Data
One of the new additions in ARKit this year is the ability to save and restore the world map data from an ARKit session. This unlocks the ability to create persistent AR experiences range of possible uses. In this tutorial Jayven N walks you through the basics showing you how to drop objects into a virtual world, saving that world and then restore it at a later date.
appcoda.com
Game of Life in Swift Playgrounds
The Game of Life, originally invented by British mathematician John Conway in 1970, has become one of the classic simulations in computer science succinctly demonstrating how complex behaviour can emerge from seemingly simple sets of rules. In this three-part series, (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), @BeauNouvelle sets out to re-create this classic simulation – this time in a Swift playground.
medium.com
Libraries
Swiff
It’s not uncommon to trawl through log files to look at the relative timings of different events but calculating delays between them is always a bit of a pain. What if you could have this done automatically? Enter Swiff, a utility script from the team at @agens which automatically transforms your time-stamped log-file into a logfile with time deltas instead.
github.com
Knil
Knil is an open-source tool from @ethanhuang13 that makes checking universal links a breeze. It works by fetching and parsing your apple-app-site-association file using the parsed information to check that each of your links works as expected and as an added bonus it also provides quick links to additional external validation tools from Branch and Apple. A useful one to have in the toolbox.
github.com
Tools
How to Build Swift Compiler-Based Tool? The Step-by-Step Guide
If you’re looking to get a better understanding of (if not more involved with) the Swift compiler and Swift code base then look no further than this article from @_siejkowski. Following on from the recent launch of their code obfuscation tool Sirius which I linked to in Issue 144, Krzysztof has published an extensive write-up of what he and the team learnt and also provides a great introduction to the layout of the Swift codebase.
polidea.com
How to Easily Find Unused Swift Code in Xcode
Maybe it’s just me but I’m never comfortable with having unusued code in my codebase. Finding unused code isn’t always the easiest of tasks though… until now. @Gabriel__Lewis has created a useful script that you can hook into your Xcode project and at build time will report any unused code as a set of compiler warnings. I’ve been trying it out on a couple of projects this week and so far it’s been great.
medium.com
Videos
Hashing, Hashable, and Hash Values
Hashes are used everwhere in programming and the Swift language is no different. @gregheo has been investigating how they work and in this talk provides a great introduction to hashes, hashing and Swift’s Hashable protocol. In addition, if you want some further reading, Greg’s also got a accompanying post on the subject that you can find here.