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
Apple Fall Event
So the rumour mill wasn’t far off with Tuesday’s event with the arrival of a revamped Macbook Air, a new iPad Pro, a shiny new Apple Pencil, an updated Mac-Mini (finally) and iOS 12.1 out in the wild. If you haven’t seen it already Apple have also released a bunch of new development material to accompany the new hardware including new videos and various documentation updates for you to dive into. Makes my reading list a little longer this week!
apple.com/
App Store Connect API
Following hot on the heels of Tuesday’s event, Friday saw Apple also announcing the availability of the new App Store Connect API making it signficantly easier to automate activities in App Store Connect such as managing TestFlight builds, managing user access and reporting. It’ll be great to see what everyone builds with this.
apple.com
Business
Embracing the Deadline: How Engineers Can Benefit from Delivery Dates
It can sometimes feel like project deadlines are constraining or are picked at random, but as @misterbyrne points out in this article, they can also be useful for alignment, coordination and bringing focus to your development activities.
intercom.com
Q3 2018 Was the Most Lucrative Quarter Yet for the App Stores
If you needed any more confirmation that the global app store market continues to grow, look no further than this article from @lexisydo. According to Lexi’s analysis, Q3 2018 has seen the largest number of downloads ever with hyper casual games contining to dominate and emerging markets acting as key drivers in the growth on iOS. Time to re-visit internationalisation of your app?
appannie.com
Design
How iPad Apps Adapt to the New 11″ and 12.9″ iPad Pro
Following on from his recent articles on the changes for the iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR Screen Sizes, @geoffhackworth has been quick to update his series with this new article looking at how iPad apps will adapt to the new 11″ and 12.9″ screen sizes. It’s a good reference for all the new screen dimensions.
medium.com
Swift
What’s .self, .Type and .Protocol? Understanding Swift Metatypes
In addition to Swift’s more overt and familier type system, Swift also has a set of less well known types – the meta types – that are lurking in the background but can be extremely useful when building type-safe generics of your own. @rockthebruno has been digging into the details.
swiftrocks.com
Void
It has no methods, no values, not even a name and is more nothing than nil. @mattt has been gazing into the abyss this week with a look at one of Swift’s strangest types – Void.
nshipster.com
Code
So You Want to Automate iOS Biometrics?
I’ve written a couple of prototype apps recently that make use of the biometric features of the iOS LocalAuthentication framework and I can personally attest that writing tests for them is a real pain given the limitations of the iOS simulator. The good news though is that @KaneCheshire has come up with a clever work-around that’s that I’ll definitely be adding to my toolbox.
theappbusiness.com
Sneaky Date Formatters Exposing More Than You Think
When developing for iOS you quickly learn that creating Date Formatters is an expensive operation with a common approach being to cache the formatter once it has been created. Beyond simply storing it as a property or variable though, @wibosco has been investigating the most efficient (and safe) approach to caching Date Formatters when they are needed by different classes or structs.
williamboles.me
Hardware
iPhone XR: A Deep Dive Into Depth
An interesting article from @sandofsky that takes a detailed dive into the different technologies that are used to detect image depth on Apple’s mobile devices.
halide.cam
Videos
Advanced Debugging in Swift
Debugging is a critical skill for Swift and iOS development but takes time and experience to develop. @kastiglione is here to help with this talk covering Xcodes breakpoint editor, LLDB and some more advanced debugging techniques.
youtube.com
Putting Your App On A Diet
Large binary sizes increases the time to download your app and can, if you exceed the over-the-air limit, mean that your users can only download it over Wifi. If you’re looking to put your app on a diet @ellsk1 has some general tips, optimisations and analysis that you can use to reduce the size of your app binaries.
youtube.com
27 Xcode Keyboard Shortcuts – Xcode 10 Tips and Tricks
Keyboard shortcuts can be a great way of increasing your efficiency as a developer and with Xcode 10 expanding the range of shortcuts that are available, it’s never been a better time to build some of them into your workflow. @seanallen_dev presents 27 of the most useful.
youtube.com