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.
Design
Modality Is the One UX Concept That Most Designers Don’t Fully Understand
A very interesting article from Fabian Sebastian look at the modality in app design including when and how you should use it in your designs. I learnt alot from this one.
The Thumb Zone
With the average screen-size of Apple’s mobile devices continuing to increase, has Apple all but abandoned designing apps for single-handed usage? @jcieplinski looks at different aspects of desinging an app for one-handed usage and along the way provides some great tips that will be directly applicable to your own designs.
Code
Optimising Images
@jordanmorgan10 takes you on a behind-the-scenes journey looking at how images are stored and rendered on iOS devices and how presenting a simple image may have a much bigger memory impact than you might think.
Visualising ARKit Sessions
Since it was first introduced, developers around the community have been continuing to push the bounaries of the ARKit framework. @argentumko and the team at @ittybittyapps are no exception, with an article and demo code exploring how ARKit data captured on one device can be live-streamed for visualisation on another device. Looks interesting.
Keeping Dates Local
Great article from argentumko looking at how to handle date localization on iOS and how the Locale and DateFormatter classes work together to handle many of the linguistic and cultural differences of working with and presenting dates.
Testing
Improving Code Testability with Swift Protocols
Protocols can be a great way to make your Swift code more testable, letting you easily add an abstraction layer between different parts of your code, including external frameworks. @JuanpeCatalan walks you through a pratical example using a simple demo app and the CoreLocation framework.
Tools
Memory Graph Debugging in Xcode
Xcode comes with some extremely powerful development tools for investigating and analysing different aspects of your projects. One such tool is the Xcode memory graph debugger, a great tool for tracking down those pesky memory leaks. This article from @dagostini provides a good introduction.
Videos
Functional Swift 2018
Now, I woudn’t want to leave you with out some Swift viewing goodness whilst I’m away so with this in mind, we’ll kick off the video section this week with this batch of videos from this years Functional Swift conference. As every there’s some great talks covering everything from UI styling to fuzz testing.
Do iOS 2018
Held at the start of November, we also have this second batch of videos, this time from the Do iOS 2018 conference in Amsterdam with talks on writing better APIs, ARKit, Siri Shortcuts, App architecture and more. Plenty of great stuff to watch over the festive period.
youtube.com
Other
Advent of Swiftmas 2018
To close out Swift Developments for this year, we’ll finish things off with @twostraws Advent of Swiftmas 2018 collection. As the name suggests, it’s an article a day from the 1st to the 24th December on a wide range of Swift topics and as an added bonus, each article is accompanied by a discounted Swift-related goodies. Might be good for your Christmas list!
Comment
So here we are – Issue 164 – and the last issue of Swift Developments for 2018! I’ve not really announced it yet, but I’m going to be taking a few weeks off over the Christmas and New Year period to spend some time with the family and have a bit of down time which means that the next issue won’t hit your inbox until January 8th. Before we dive into this weeks links though I wanted to say a few thankyou’s to round off 2018. Firstly, thanks to everyone who has taken the time and effort to write and publish articles, give talks, build libraries and create videos this year – without you there would be no content to feature in Swift Developments and the Swift and iOS community wouldn’t be as vibrant as it is. Thanks also to the sponsors I’ve had this year. Your support has made it much easier to keep Swift Developments going and it has been a great help. Finally, thanks to you for subscribing and reading this year – I hope it’s been useful and hopefully it will continue to be that way in 2019. So with that said, have a very happy holiday season and New Year period and I’ll see you again in 2019!