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
Writing A Great App Store Description
After your app icon, your app store description is one of the most important tools you have for persuading users to download your app. In this article, @stuartkhall provides some great tips on what to think about when writing an app description of your own.
medium.com
Fake Ads as a Business Model
I’m not sure what I think about this article from @olebegemann. On the one hand, developers are always looking for additional ways to monetise their apps but I can’t help but feel that if we’re having to resort to approaches like this, something is definitely broken somewhere.
oleb.net
Design
A Design Exploration of 3D Touch: Feedback
As we all know, 3D-touch is still a relatively new feature in the iOS ecosystem and as @stoosepp points out, some of the design side of things are yet to catch up. In this article he conducts an interesting exploration of how to provide users feedback in this 3D-touch world.
medium.com
Animation in Mobile UX Design
Another second great app-design article this week with this one from @101babich exploring the use of animation in mobile user experience design. There’s some great ideas here.
Swift
New Features in Swift 2.2
With the release of Swift 2.2, many developers are playing catchup with the new syntax, new features and a range of deprecations. If this applies to you and you’re looking for a quick summary of what to look out for this article from @twostraws is for you.
swift.org
Swift: Money with Phantom Types
I’d not come across the idea of ‘phantom types’ until this article from @natashatherobot. It’s an interesting idea.
natashatherobot.com
Breaking Swift with Reference Counted Structs
@cocoawithlove takes a look at structs and reference counting in Swift. As he says in the article, there are a number of things that he mentions that you shouldn’t be doing, but along the way you’ll definitely learn things.
Tools
SwiftLint
Having coding style guides is all well and good but we’re all human and it is easy to miss things. This is where SwiftLint comes in. SwiftLint checks your source code for programmatic and stylistic errors. This article from @BWoronin provides a great introduction.
swifting.io
Libraries
UIImageColors
A great little library from @jathu that takes the pain out of color matching against UIImages.
github.com
Cache
Caching of resources is an important consideration iOS app these days. This is where Cache comes in. Cache is a hyper-focused caching library from the team at @hyperoslo. It’s not the kitchen sink of caching libraries, instead it’s relatively compact, it does one thing, and it does it well.
github.com
Videos
Ready for the Future: Writing Better Swift
@dimsumthinking gives a great talk on how to either write or refactor your code to reduce it’s cognitive load and make your code a pleasure to read. The talk includes some great examples and is definitely worth watching.
realm.io
Exploring MVC-N in Swift
@mzarra tackles the age-old question of where should the responsibilities of making network requests fit into the MVC paradigm?
realm.io
Finally
Smart People Need Silence
I was trying to explain this article from @AndrewDixonSo to my trio of 3-year-olds… surprisingly they weren’t getting it ?
Comment
It’s been a relatively quiet week for me. For the first time in along time I’ve managed take some time off which has been great. It’s given me time to catch up on some reading as well as time to plan a variety of future posts for the site. The other thing it’s given me time to do is collect a great selection of articles and links for this weeks newsletter. I hope you like them.