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
‘There’s more in the making’
So Apple have announce that October 30th will be the date for this years Autumn Apple event via a great lineup of Apple artwork. Obviously no concrete details yet of what’s going to be announced but according to Zac Hall of 9to5Mac we’ll likely see updates to iPad, Macbook and potentially updates the wider Mac line up. You never know, they might even release more details of the about the modular Mac Pro that was rumoured. But then again…
9to5mac.com
Swift Language Server Protocol Service
This didn’t quite make the deadline for last weeks issue but it’s important to mention. If you haven’t seen it already Apple tools developer Argyrios Kyrtzidis took to the Swift forums to re-iterate Apple’s support for high-quality tooling for both Apple and non-Apple platforms along with announcing a new open-source project for Swift and C-based languages based on the Language Server Protocol. The announcement of this project is actually really great news and if everything goes according to plan, should open the door for some great Swift tooling in future. Definitely one to keep an eye on.
swift.org
Design
iOS at Scale: Modulariation of the Wayfair App
As your iOS development team grows, you inevitably face the challenges of a larger code base and longer build times along with the inevitable dent in productivity. This was the challenge faced by Bradley Smith and Sean Scalabrini with their Wayfair app but as you will see from their article they chose a modularisation approach which has turned out to be great help.
wayfair.com
Code
TIL: Boy, Have I Been Misusing SCNetworkReachability
Many developers use SCNNetworkReachability to enable and disable features within their app based on the current reported connectivity state but as Jared Sinclair reports, you maybe not always be able to trust the answers it’s giving you…
jaredsinclair.com
Realistic Rendering of 3D Photogrammetry Model in ARKit
ARKit has opened up a wide range of AR possibilities including the ability to import and use photogrammetry models within your SceneKit scenes. In this tutorial Koushan Korouei walks you through the whole process from sourcing the model to matching the lighting in your scene. Cake anyone?
medium.com
Exploring Custom watchOS Watch Faces
Inspired by some of the work by Steve Troughton-Smith there has been alot of talk around the community around creating custom watch faces. David Smith has been exploring some of these ideas from a design perspective.
david-smith.org
Re-creating the Siri Shortcuts Drawer Interaction
If you’ve been playing around with the Siri Shortcuts app since the release of iOS 12, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the short-cut draw that you can slide up from the bottom of the screen to select new steps and integrations. Phill Farrugia has a nice tutorial in which he re-creates it from scratch.
medium.com
Tools
Building an iOS App Without Xcode’s Build System
Want to get a better understanding of how Xcode’s build system works? There’s no better way than walking through the steps yourself, something that Vojta Stavik has done in detail in this article.
medium.com
Connecting Xcode to a Running Process
You’ll no doubt be familiar with kicking off an app from Xcode and then debugging it using the in-built Xcode debugger but did you know that you can also kick the app off independently and then attach to it whilst it’s running? It’s can be really useful and in fact it’s something I’ve been doing quite a lot for an app I’m busy developing for a client. Keith Harrison walks you through what’s involved.
useyourloaf.com
Reverse engineering the .car file format (compiled Asset Catalogs)
Great piece of detective work from @timacfr in which he reverse engineers the format of compiled asset catalogue files. It’s interesting to see how it works under the hood.
timac.org
Videos
Let Them Say What They Want: Adding Siri Shortcuts
Siri shortcuts have provided a wide range of new opportunities for improving the user experience of your app by giving users much easier access to frequent actions. In this talk from try! Swift NYC 2018, Christina Moulton walks you through what they are and how to implement them.
youtube.com
Hacking Marzipan
With Marzipan still scheduled for 2019, Peter Steinberger looks at the current hacks needed to try Marzipan for yourself and walks through some of the things he needed to do to get PDF Viewer to run on macOS Mojave.
youtube.com