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
Inside Apple’s Team That Greenlights iPhone Apps for the App Store
Back in Issue 186 I linked to an interesting podcast in which @markgurman interviewed @pbsIdentity about his time as Apple’s App Approval Chief and how the app review process worked at that time. Whilst things have obviously changed since then, this week we gained some insights into the current app store review process with this interesting CNBC article from @kifleswing.
cnbc.com
Swift
You Don’t (Always) Need [weak self]
Retain cycles are a common source of memory leaks. One common way of breaking them is capturing self weakly but if you don’t think about it, it’s all too easy to fall into the habit of sprinkling weak self all across your code including in cases you don’t actually need it. To help with this, in this article @beshermaleh explores some of the cases where [weak self] really isn’t needed and can safely be ignored.
medium.com
Code
Scanning documents with Vision and VisionKit on iOS 13
One of the big new features in Apple’s Vision framework in iOS 13 is support for text recognition. @justjs_dev has been taking the new feature for a spin and in this post shows you how to use these new text recognition APIs to identify and extract text within an image.
schiavo.me
Building a weather app with SwiftUI
One good way to get your head around new technologies is to use them in real projects. If you’re looking to get up to speed with SwiftUI then check out this post from @benjamin_pisano which does just that, showing you how to build a real-world weather app using SwiftUI and the Dark Sky API.
medium.com
How to Build a Form UI with SwiftUI
With the arrival of Xcode Beta 2 this week, we saw another bump in functionality for SwiftUI including the addition of support for Forms – a new control for applying a standardized look and feel to data entry controls. If you’re living on the bleeding edge with SwiftUI, then take a look at this introduction from @simonng.
appcoda.com
A LinkPresentation Introduction
Now if I’m honest, I’d completely missed the introduction of the LinkPresentation framework until I saw this article from @jordanmorgan10. From a user perspective, you’ll be familiar with it already if you’ve seen URL previews in apps like Messages, but in iOS 13 the framework has been opened up to developers.
swiftjectivec.com
Tools
Using Xcode Previews with Existing Views Without Using SwiftUI
Whilst you’d be forgiven for thinking that the new preview canvas available in Xcode 11 is only for use with your SwiftUI code, in reality, it can also be used for your existing UIView and UIViewController code as well providing a huge boost for iterating on your existing UI designs. @twannl shows you how to get started.
avanderlee.com
Conferences
WWDC 2019 Session Notes
With over 100+ videos this year at WWDC it’s pretty difficult to keep track of everything that was announced but as the saying goes – “many hands make light work” – so with a bit of crowd-sourcing goodness, @Blackjacxxx has put together a very useful new repo that provides bullet-point summaries of an ever-growing list of this year’s sessions.
github.com
Videos
Designing Lean Abstractions
This session’s description does a pretty good job of describing it: “Abstractions are meant to simplify things, but often make things more complicated. This talk highlights common pitfalls in abstraction, and contrasts the OOP approach with Data Oriented Design, a paradigm popular in real-time rendering.” I enjoyed this one from @sandofsky.
appdevcon.nl
Podcasts
Swift By Sundell Podcast: Episode 50
The Swift by Sundell podcast reached episode 50 this week (congrats John!) and to celebrate, it’s host @johnsundell was joined by very special guest @clattner_llvm to talk Swift past, present and future. As ever, it’s an interesting listen.
swiftbysundell.com
Other
The Urge To Be The First
We’re going to close this week with this short article from @pepibumur. I’ll be honest, with a day job and Swift Developments taking up a chunk of time each week I’ve definitely not had as much time as I would like to play with the new announcements this year so this one definitely struck home for me. Thanks for the great reminder Pedro! ?
ppinera.es