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
Xcode 10.2 Beta
Now, I don’t normally include details about Xcode beta releases in Swift Developments but this week I thought I’d make an exception – the reason? This week we’ve got the first version beta version of Xcode bundled with Swift 5.0! You can find all the details about the Xcode portion of the release here and the Swift portion here. If you’re looking to get up to speed with Swift 5.0’s new features I’d recommend checking out @twostraws December article “What’s New in Swift 5.0” which gives a good overview.
Business
Trouble Hiring Senior Engineers? It’s probably You
Are you finding it hard to hire senior engineers for your development teams? Looking for some ways you can improve things? @alexhiring has written a great article on why you might be struggling along with some tips on how to attract top talent to your teams.
Phased vs Regular Update Adoption Rates
In last weeks issue, I linked to an article from the team at @gummicube looking the benefits of employing a soft launch for your next release. If you want to see what this might look like in real terms, @_DavidSmith has this week published some stats on the adoption rate of one of his recent updates of Pedometer++ using Apple’s Phased Rollout feature within iTunes connect. It makes for interesting reading.
Design
Checklists for Using Icons in UI
Icons are used everywhere in our app designs but what distinguishes a good icon from a bad one? @101babich has written an article with some great tips to keep in mind.
Code
Building a Scalable URL Shortner Service Using Swift with Vapor 3
If you’re looking to dip your toe into the world of server-side Swift, this is a fun project from Andrew Scott uses Vapor (along with some Docker scaffolding) to build a scalable URL shortening service. Might be a good little project for next weekend.
Introductory Pricing for iOS: Getting Started
For subscription-based apps one of the biggest difficulties of growing a user base is getting the user to take that the step and actually sign up for a subscription. In this tutorial @poccaDot shows you how to lower the barrier to entry by implementing a free or discount period for your app.
How I Created Apple’s Voice Memo’s Clone
It’s always interesting to see how people pull together different UI components, especially when you’re familiar with the original app. This article is no execption with @hassanedesouky walking through the steps to build a clone of Apple’s Voice Memo’s UI.
TextOutputStream
You’ll have no doubt used Swift’s print statement but are you familiar with all it’s different variants? @mattt continues his detailed dives into the more obscure parts of the Swift Standard Library with a look at the TextOutputStream protocol.
Tools
Kick-ass CLI Tools In Swift
Despite the growing number of command line tools available, many of these new tools continue to be written in languages other than Swift. But why is this? Is it technical? Cultural? @daniel_duan has some thoughts.
Videos
iOS Conference SG 2019
Ok, so you might have to ration your video viewing this week as the team at @iosconfsg have released a bumper set of videos from this years iOS Conference SG. Note to self – I must not binge watch… I must not binge watch…
youtube.com
Other
10 Year Challenge: How Popular iOS Apps Have Changed
Oh how times have changed. With the App Store now 10 years old, @ValiaHavryliuk takes a look at how some of the store’s most popular apps have changed over the years. Bring back skeuomorphism I say. ?