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
Vapor Cloud
It must be a time for things to come to an end. Over the Christmas period, the Vapor core team have announced that Vapor Cloud will be shutting down as of 29th February. Check out the link for more details as well as guides on migrating to other platforms such as Heroku. It doesn’t mean Vapor is dead though. Far from it. @tanner0101 has already detailed many of the new changes for Vapor 4 and with IBM recently announcing that it will not continue working on Swift (and therefore Kitura) in 2020, I really hope the community get behind Vapor and help push it forward.
vapor.cloud
Business
How We Run the NetNewsWire Open Source Project
Looking for some tips on how to run your next open source project? Look no further than this article from @brentsimmons details how he and the team run the development of the popular open-source RSS reader – NetNewsWire. I like the structure of their approach and it’s got some great ideas that are worth thinking about for your next project.
inessential.com
Swift
The Decade of Swift
With Swift a little over 5 years old now, @johnsundell takes a look back at how Swift has changed, evolved and developed as well as some of the things that are coming in the future. I’ll be really interested to see if the 2020s see Swift fully breaking out of the Apple ecosystem.
swiftbysundell.com
Turning Property Wrappers into Function Wrappers
@v_pradeilles takes an interesting look at one of Swift 5.1’s new features – property wrappers – and how we can actually use them to wrap functions as well as data opening up a whole range of new possibilities.
medium.com
Using Type Erasure to Build a Dependency Injecting Routing Framework in Swift
Although Swift’s strongly-typed nature provides huge benefits there are occasions when it’s strict typing gets in the way. This is where type erasure comes in. It’s a complicated topic but this example from @rockthebruno provides a great example of type erasure in practice, illustrating how you can use it to build a dependency injecting routing framework.
swiftrocks.com
Code
Advances in Apple’s Vision Framework: 2019 Year-in-Review
Apple’s Vision framework has come along way in the last few years gaining a number of exciting new features and improvements. 2019 was no exception and in this article, @chughanupam provides a summary of all of 2019’s new features along with links to articles that show many of them in use.
fritz.ai
SwiftUI
SwiftUI Learning Curve in 2019
If you’re looking to get up to speed with SwiftUI this year, then make sure you check out this post from @mecid which brings together a whole host of articles he’s written over the last six months on different aspects of working with SwiftUI. It’s a good place to start if you’re looking to get up to speed.
swiftwithmajid.com
Finally
On Forming Habits
With a new year typically come new goals. Whether it be self-improvement, side projects, publishing your next (or first) app or simply learning something new – habits are a powerful tool in moving you forward and with the challenges ahead for me in 2020, this article from @jordanmorgan10 rang true in so many ways. Have a wonderful 2020, thanks again for all the support over the last five years and go out there and see what you can build.
swiftjectivec.com
Welcome to Swift Developments Issue 212 the first issue of 2020, the first issue of the next decade but sadly what will be the last issue of Swift Developments for a while.
Like many, I use the end of the year as a time for reflection, a time for looking back at what I’ve achieved but also a time to look forward to what I want to accomplish in the coming year.
My break this year has let me do some serious soul searching and with the knowledge of a number of major challenges coming my way this coming year, it feels like the right time to take a break from Swift Developments for a while so that I can focus on some other areas of life and the challenges ahead.
To this end then, I wanted to thank you for all the support, input and encouragement over the last few years. It’s genuinely spurred me on over the last 200 or so issues and in return, I really hope you have found Swift Developments useful. At the moment, I’m not sure what the future of Swift Developments will be in the long term. It may return. It may not but regardless of what happens, I want to wish you a wonderful, successful, and ‘Swifty’ 2020 and beyond!