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
Overtime Hurts Your Software & Your Team
Echoing the recent backlash around one notable game company who proudly announced their engineers were working over 100 hour weeks to get their latest game finished, @plainprogrammer has written a great article looking at the implicit problems of overtime and why it may actually be a sign of deep-rooted cultural problems within your organisation.
medium.com
Design
Microinteractions in User Experience
@alitamjoyce takes you on a guided tour of micro interactions, explaining what they are, why they’re important and how they can have a big impact on your apps user experience.
nngroup.com
Why Shortcuts Matter for Accessibility
One of the big arrivals this summer has been the reincarnation of Workflow as Apple’s Shortcuts app following it’s aquisition back in 2017. Beyond the greater efficiency and control that the Shortcuts app obviously provides, the app itself is has also had a big impact in terms of the overall accessibility of the iOS platform, a fact that is highlighted very well in this article from @steven_aquino. Given this, there really is no better time to add shortcut support to your own apps.
macstories.net
Swift
Swift 4.2: How the Weirdest Error Message Led To Reimagining Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals
@iosbrain digs into some strange error messages he encountered, tracking the cause to some of the recent Swift 4.2 changes to Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals. Worth a read if you haven’t been following Swift Evolution particularly closely.
iosbrain.com
Code
Power-Up Your Anchors
Using Auto Layout programatically is the preferred approach for many Apple developers especially for those wishing to avoid the potential conflicts that storyboards can sometimes introduce. Rather than turning to third-party libraries such as SnapKit or Cartography though, this tutorial from @pedrommcarrasco shows you how to build a layout API of your own on top of NSLayoutAnchor.
github.io
More Types
A good example (and reminder) from @samuelgoodwin on how introducing a new type can often make a huge difference in making your code more testable.
roundwallsoftware.com
Refactoring Large Codebases: Tips and Tricks
As the article headline suggests – this article from @swanros has some great tips and tricks to keep in mind when faced with (the sometimes daunting) prospect of refactoring a large code base.
pspdfkit.com
Libraries
SwiftSyntax
Although you might not recognize it by name, you may have already used Apple’s SwiftSyntax library without even knowing it. Broken out of the main Swift code base in August 2017, SwiftSyntax is a library that allows Swift tools to parse, inspect, generate and transform Swift code and already forms part of the Swift Migrator. @mattt takes a look at how it works.
nshipster.com
Other
Big O Notation
If you haven’t got a Computer Science background (or maybe if you’re looking to brush up for your next interview) this article might be for you. @dagostin provides a gentle introduction to the science of computer algorithms with at look at Big O notation – a technique for estimating and illustrating algorithmic performance.
agostini.tech
Podcasts
Ethical Monetization
Interesting episode of Under the Radar this week from @marcoarment and @_davidsmith this week discussing the on-going issue of apps employing shady tactics to trick users into high-priced subscriptions.
relay.fm
Videos
Interactive Card View Animation with UIPropertyAnimator Tutorial
With interactive card views used in an increasing numuber of native iOS apps, @brianadventcode has a nice tutorial showing you how to implement one of your own.
youtube.com
Comment
Welcome to this weeks issue of Swift Developments! Only a couple of hours now until Apple’s fall event kicks off with the promise of new iPads, updated Macbooks, iMacs and a potential phoenix-like resurrection of the Mac Mini line. With the rumour-mill inevitably in high-gear, it will be interesting to see what they announce. In the meantime though I’ve got some great links this week for you to while away the time. Enjoy.