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
Soft Launching Your App – What It Is And Why You Should Do It
After months of hard work your app is finally ready. At this point, it’s extremely tempting to go for that big-bang world-wide launch but as the team at @gummicube point out, a soft-launch may be a better strategy.
Get Your iOS App Features on the App Store with These 11 Tips
As you probably know, getting featured on the App store can have a huge impact in terms of exposure and app sales. But how do you improve your chances of actually getting featured? The team at @appfigures have put together 11 tips to improve your chances.
Design
Save Changes Before Quitting?
I really enjoyed this article from @nubero. It’s a bit of a nostalgic look back at the inception of the Mac OS user interface but also illustrates the importance of small details when it comes to interface design.
All in One Bookmark Links for Designer
A colleague at work called this ‘design nirvana’ when he came across this link this week. There’s no doubt about it, it’s a great resource from the team at @evernote.
Code
Building an Trello-like iOS App with Drag & Drop API
Since their introduction in iOS 11, UIKit’s drag and drop APIs have allowed the development of more powerful, more intuitive user interfaces, especially on the iPad. In this tutorial, @alfianlosari shows you how to take advantage of some of this power by developing a Kanban board app similar to Trello.
Clear and Searchable Logging in Swift with OSLog
The bottom line is that if you’re still using print statements for logging you really should take a look at Apple’s OSLog logging API. @lordcodes has written a useful introduction to get you going.
Tools
swift-sh
@mxcl‘s new project – swift-sh has been getting alot of attention this week. It’s a shim around the Swift compiler that automatically generates a Swift package for your Swift scripts before using special import statement comments to add and manage third-party dependencies. It’s still early days but looks promising and has already been featured by @mattt in his latest article on @NSHipster.
All About the Swift Package Manager and the Swift Toolchain
Looking to develop your knowledge of the Swift Package Manager? This article from @tiborbodecs is a great place to start with an in-depth look at it’s architecture and how it works behind the scenes.
How to Read Apple’s Developer Documentation
Another great guide from @twostraws – this time on how to get the most from Apple’s developer documentation. An essential read – expecially if you’re just getting started.
Podcasts
The Swift Community Podcast
This week has seen the launch of a new podcast for the Swift community – The Swift Community Podcast. Rather than taking the typical approach with the same hosts and same format each week, this project its taking a different approach – one that is entirely driven and guided by the community. Planning and coordination is being done via the associated GitHub project and the first episode is already up with co-hosts @johnsundell, @garricn and @clattner_llvm explaining more about the concept of the show, why it’s been created along with a look back at the early days of Swift language and Swift Evolution process.
swiftcommunitypodcast.org