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
Bandwidth Challenges for the Cocopods Team
This week saw some significant challenges for anyone using Cocoapods with issues with cloning the Cocoapods spec repo. Turns out, that due to some of the optimisations in Cocopods the repo is creating a bit of a challenge to the GitHub infrastructure and caused some of GitHubs automatic rate limiting to kick in. The good news is that there does seem to be a workaround in the offing (see the details in this issue for details) so hopefully things will settle down in the coming days.
github.com
Design
A Designers Guide to DPI
With the variety of different displays and screen resolutions now available across both the iOS and OSX platforms, having a good understanding of DPI or (Dots Per Inch) is an essential part of great app design. This article from @kounterb provides a simple and straightforward introduction to the topic.
sebastien-gabriel.com
Microinteractions: The Secret of Great App Design
“The best products do two things well: features and details. Features are what draw people to your product. Details are what keep them there and are actually what make your apps stand out from the competition”.
In this article, @101babich takes a look at how we can use microinteractions within our apps to provides the details that turn our apps from average to great.
uxplanet.org
Motion Design is the Future of UI
Nowadays, app design isn’t just about how you layout the views in your application it also about how we transition between these views and how animation can be integrated to convey dynamism and meaning to user interactions. In this article, @TheKineticUI gives some great tips about how to integrated motion into your own app designs.
prototypr.io
Code
Caesar Cipher
I remember playing with coder rings as a kid. Making them out of cardboard and coloring them in with felt-tip before using them to construct secret messages that I could send to my friends. Anyway, I kinda grew out of the whole spy thing but it did peak my interest this week when I saw this article from @RedQueenCoder in which she builds her own Caesar Cipher library. I’m not sure it’ll be much of a challenge to the NSA but following along with the article is a good way of flexing your Swift programming skills.
redqueencoder.com
Swift Sets
Set’s seem to be the poor cousin when it comes to the Swift collection types so this week I decided to take a look at them in detail and see just what we can achieve with them. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
andybargh.com
Gathering System Information in Swift Using sysctl
In this article, a follow-on from the article I included last weeks newsletter, @cocoawithlove looks at the second half of the stack trace equation by looking how we can gather information about the environment and platform on which our processes are executing.
cocoawithlove.com
Tools
Code Injection for Xcode
I have to admit, I can sometimes be a little impatient, especially when waiting for the inevitable edit, build, run cycle in Xcode. It was with great interest then, that I saw this post from @orta in which he gives a very compelling demonstration of just how much we can speed up the development cycle through the use of the Injection Plugin for Xcode by @Injection4Xcode. It’s definitely something I’ll be looking at a little more in the coming days.
github.io
Libraries
Building Popular Projects
Although it has a definite advantage, if you’ve been paying attention since the release of Swift into the open-source world, you may have noticed that it isn’t just releasing the code that has made the project a success. Documentation, guidelines and community have all played their part and in this article, @ashfurrow provides some great tips on how you can do the same.
ashfurrow.com
WWDC app for OS X
The videos from WWDC and the other Apple Tech Talks are a great resource and if you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself going back through the archives to revisit different topics. @_inside has made this task even easier, with this native OS X app that provides direct access to these videos without even having to open a browser.
github.com
Books
Core Image for Swift: Advanced Image Processing for iOS
Apple’s Core Image framework is one of the most powerful frameworks available to developers on iOS and when combined with the ever climbing performance of Apple’s hardware platforms we can now push the performance capabilities of these platforms further than ever before. With this in mind, this week, @FlexMonkey released his new book – Core Image for Swift. The book provides a comprehensive guide to the Core Image framework and I couldn’t resist adding it to my basket. It’s a great read if you’re creating apps that perform any sort of image manipulation.
apple.com
Videos
Swift [and the] Evolution
I missed this video when it was first released. In it, @griotspeak highlights both the history and future of Swift. I think more importantly though, he gives some great advance about getting involved in the Swift community and how you can contribute to the future direction of the language.
thedotpost.com
Challenges Building a Swift Framework
In this video from MBLTDev15, @mrackwitz discusses some of the challenges and lessons learnt from building frameworks for Swift. It includes some useful tips if you’re building frameworks of your own.
realm.io
iOS UIs Built As Lego Bricks
I really like the idea that @wangshengjia presents in this talk. The idea of being able to not only declaratively declare your UI, but also re-configure it in a flexible manner at runtime. For me the idea has definite appeal. If you’re interested, the associated GitHub repo is here.
thedotpost.com
Fun and Fast Audio with Swift
Audio is an often overlooked aspect of app design but can actually be a big part of the user experience. In this talk @AudioKitMan shows us just how easy it is to learn audio synthesis, processing and analysis by simply using Swift playgrounds.
realm.io
Comment
So the rumour mill is switching into high gear with Apple’s announcement of it’s press event on March 21st. From what I can tell there seems to be rumours about a new 4-inch iPhone and a new 9.7 inch iPad potentially adding to the device lineup. Whether this turns out to be true or not, it’ll be interesting to see what Apple announce. Anyway, this week has been a pretty good week on the article front so let’s dive in.