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.
Issue 202 – October 8th 2019
Business
Marketing Dark Noise
Let’s open this week with a really interesting article from @chuckyc17 on how he marketed his new app Dark Noise. It’s only a month since release so we might not be seeing the full picture but it’s interesting to see what has been working and what hasn’t from a marketing perspective.
charliemchapman.com
How to Get Featured in the App Store
Getting featured in the app store can be a huge boost to the success of an app and whilst there aren’t any guarantees on how to get featured, @appfigures have put together an article with some tips to keep in mind that could definitely improve your chances.
appfigures.com
How to Make Good Code Reviews Better
Code reviews have a huge number of benefits for your development process from spotting logic errors, to sharing knowledge and increasing code quality. If you’re already doing code reviews then great, but are you getting the best from them? @gergelyorosz has written a useful article on how might be able to further improve things.
stackoverflow.blog
Code
HEIC Image Compression for iOS
With image and video quality continuing to increase, we’re seeing a proportional increase in the size of these media files stored on users devices. To minimise storage on disk, Apple has been investing heavily in various data compression algorithms and for images has adopted HEIC Image Compression as the algorithm of choice. In this tutorial, @naturaln0va provides you with an introduction to this new algorithm and how to use it to save space when saving images to disk.
raywenderlich.com
How to Implement Full-Text Search on iOS
When it comes to data persistence on iOS, Core Data is one of the most popular choices but there are some cases when it just isn’t the right answer. In this tutorial, @pakisha1989 shows you how to use SQLite directly, to add full-text search capabilities to your iOS app.
medium.com
Discover the New Apple CryptoKit Framework
One of the new additions in iOS 13 this year was the arrival of the new CryptoKit framework from Apple making it much easier for developers to create hashes, encrypt data and verify signatures. In this gentle introduction, @domeniconicoli shows you some of the basics.
medium.com
A Comprehensive Guide to All 120+ Settings URLs Supported by iOS and iPad OS 13.1
The ability to open different sections of Apple’s Settings app on iOS via the prefs:root URL scheme isn’t particularly new but what has been difficult is trying to find the different URLs that are actually supported. To make life easier @viticci has been doing some research for iOS and iPad OS 13.1 and has collated and tested a list of +120 URLs that are known to work.
macstories.net
Tools
How to Use SwiftUI in Swift Playgrounds
I’ve found having a live preview of your SwiftUI app in Catalina to be a great boost for productivity but wouldn’t it be great if you could have that in Swift Playgrounds as well. Well, the good news is that Apple has just updated Swift Playgrounds on the iPad to support for both Swift 5.1 and SwiftUI so with a little UIHostingController magic it is, for the most part, now possible. This but this article from @twostraws shows you how to get started.
hackingwithswift.com
Testing
Getting Started with Unit Testing on iOS
Late to the unit testing party? Looking to get started? @donnywals has recently published a two-part series (Part 1, Part 2) to help get you started covering the basics of writing synchronous and asynchronous unit tests.
donnywals.com
Videos
Bar Chart with SegmentedControl Binding
@buildthatapp continues to explore SwiftUI with this step-by-step tutorial showing you how to build your own data-driven bar chart using SwiftUI.
youtu.be
NSSpain 2019 Videos
If you weren’t lucky enough to go attend NSSpain in person this year, fear not. The team at @NSSpain have started to release videos from this year’s event and as you might expect – there are some great talks to choose from.
vimeo.com
360iDev 2019 Videos
If that wasn’t enough box watching, make sure you also check out this set of videos from this year’s @360iDev. I know, I know – there are just too many choices this week!
youtube.com
Welcome to Issue 202! With Catalina finally being pushed out into the wild this week, we’ve got a jam-packed issue covering everything from unit testing and SwiftUI to CryptoKit and HEIC compression algorithms. Enjoy and have a good week!