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
How to Start your Business on the App Store and Become an Indie iOS Developer
If you’ve been around the iOS app development community for any length of time you’ll know that making a living on the App Store is hard. Really hard. In this article @matmanferdini explains some of the lessons he has learnt from over 10 years of building a business and developing for OS X and iOS.
matteomanferdini.com
Design
MVVM Is Not Very Good
Some interesting points from @kanlou on why you shouldn’t use MVVM within your apps as it doesn’t fundamentally change the structure of most MVC apps. He also highlights bad naming as a contributory factor resulting in unclear responsibilities between classes.
kanlou.com
MVVM is Exceptionally OK
The interesting thing was that in response to the article from @kanlou above, we got these counterpoints from @ashfurrow in which he addresses some of the points in the previous article but also highlights that MVVC is just an initial step on a path that gradually leads away from Massive View Controller Syndrome. Either way, read together both articles make for interesting reading.
ashfurrow.com
Code
Details Matter – Harnessing the Power of Core Animation
Honestly, I’m a sucker for a good UI with pretty animations. In this article @merrowing_ shows us just how easy it is to harness the power of Core Animation in your own UIViews.
merowing.info
Protocol Oriented Segue Identifiers
Building on some of the information from the Swift in Practice session from WWDC, @natashatherobot looks at a cleaner way to handle multiple segue identifiers in your View Controller code.
natashatherobot.com
Working with Unwind Segues Programmatically in Swift
Sticking with the subject of segues, this week also saw this article from @andrewbancroft in which he looks at how to use Swift to programatically unwind your navigation stacks.
andrewcbancroft.com
Libraries
Swift and Dynamic Frameworks in Top Favorite Apps of 2015
I always find it interesting to see what libraries and frameworks other apps are using. It seems I’m not alone as this week, the team at @MLSDevCom have used the powers of introspection to take a look at the frameworks being used by some of the most successful and high-profile apps on the App Store.
mlsdev.com
Swift-AI
For some reason for me, artificial intelligence has always been one of those topics that has interested me but I’ve never had any time to investigate further. This week though, I came across this framework which peaked my interest. It’s a high-performance artificial intelligence and machine learning library written in Swift.
github.com
Tools
Finding Non-Localized Strings
With our increasing ability to distribute apps in multiple international markets, internationalisation has never been more important. In this article @kharrison gives us some killer tips on how to track down localization strings that we may have missed.
useryourloaf.com
Videos
Beyond The Grid — Creating Unique, High Performance Interfaces With UICollectionView
Think UICollectionViews are just UITableViews in a grid? Think again. In this video @neror shows us just what is possible with a little maths, a little patience and some imagination.
realm.io
Apple TV Tech Talks
Not videos per-se, but for those of you who weren’t lucky enough to be able to attend some of the recent AppleTV tech talks, Apple has released some of the supporting material from those sessions including documentation and example code. I’m only hoping that there will be some videos to follow.
apple.com
Comment
Not much from me this week as things wind down for Christmas.
Just to let you know though that I’m going to be taking a bit of a break over the festive period so that I can spend some time with family and friends. As a result, this is going to be the last issue of the newsletter for 2015! I know, I know, what will you do without it? Don’t despair though, the newsletter will be back better than ever in the New Year with all the latest news, links and articles from over the Christmas period.
In the mean time I just wanted to say thanks again for subscribing. I really hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter this year and if you do have any suggestions or anything you want to share over the break just reply to this email or use the contact form on the website and I’ll get back to you.
Otherwise, all that is left to do is wish you a very happy and relaxing Christmas and a wonderful New Year!