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
Swift On Android?
I was a little surprised when I saw this article during the week. According to @TheNextWeb it looks like Google are looking at potentially using Swift on Android as a solution to their on-going licensing battle with Oracle. I suspect that any migration will be some way off (due to the sheer volume of work involved) but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months. If it does happen though, it would be great news for many iOS developers as it would open up a whole new market for many iOS developers.
thenextweb.com
Monetisation Models
One of the major news events this week in the Mac development world has been the decision by Smile Software to switch their monetisation approach to away from a simple paid-up-front model toward a subscription model. As most of us know, software development takes time and effort and generally ain’t cheap, so as a developer, I can understand their desire to explore new avenues for revenue generation. For many though including me, the associated price hike may be too in the long-term, especially given the range of potential alternatives in the marketplace. @mjtsai has a good round up of exactly what’s been going on.
mjtsai.com
Business
A Little Thing About Release Notes
If, like me, you’ve seen any of Slacks recent release notes, you may have had a chuckle to yourself. Slack’s release notes are a great example of mixing information with personality and humour and in this article, @annapickard gives us a rundown of exactly how they do it.
slackhq.com
Design
Principles of Mobile App Design
Written by @jennylg, Google’s UX Research lead, this series of articles work through 25 different principles of app design that together can contribute to a great mobile user experience. Topics include navigation, search, registration and form entry to name a few. Oh, and don’t worry – the principles she covers are as applicable to iOS development as they are to Android so it’s still worth reading.
thinkwithgoogle.com
Code
Bridges of Siracusa County
In this article, @xenadu02 discusses his recent proposal for exposing Swift classes to be able to expose Objective-C friendly interfaces without the need to compromise the design of your Swift code (such as defining models as classes rather than structs). Above and beyond the proposal itself, the article itself also contains some great notices on developing the proposal itself. Worth reading if you’re thinking of contributing.
russbishop.net
Using Swift Extensions the Wrong Way
I really liked this article from @natashatherobot. It’s a reminder about just how useful Swift extensions are for improving the organisation and readability of your code by both hiding and grouping related sets of functionality.
natashatherobot.com
Compiling and interpolating C using the Swift Package Manager
The capabilities of the Swift package manager have been coming on leaps and bounds in recent weeks and this week was no exception. In this article, @aciidb0mb3r discusses the how to write Swift packages that contain both Swift and C code.
ankit.im
Tools
Using Xcode Schemes To Run a Subset of Your Tests
As you’re app grows, so will the number of tests and so will the time it takes to run them. (You are writing unit tests aren’t you?) Anyway, this useful tip from @orta, shows you how to temporarily partition your test suite so that you can run just the tests in the area that you are working on.
github.io
Community
Meeting People is Easy, But Hard
After a long spell of hiding behind closed doors, recent months have seen me getting more involved with the Swift and iOS development community, (partly through this newsletter and partly through the articles I’ve been writing for the website). As a result, I’ve also been debating about whether to attend my first iOS conference this year (by going to iOSDevUK). As with many engineers though, I personally edge toward the introverted end of the spectrum rather than the extrovert so the prospect of attending my first conference on my own is a little daunting. With this in mind then, this article from @yonomitt really resonated with me this week and provides some great tips that I’ll be keeping in mind should I attend.
yonomitt.com
Videos
Understand Monads with this One Weird Trick
I’ll be honest, my background is object-oriented development and so sometimes many of the concepts of functional programming can be a bit mind-bending. This video from @jqsilver helped though and has allowed me to solidify and reinforce some of my mental models.
realm.io
Practical Cross-Platform Swift
In this video from try! Swift, @simjp looks at the practicalities of developing, debugging, packaging and deploying cross-platform Swift code in todays environment. It’s a good watch if cross-platform Swift development is your thing.
realm.io
Comment
Welcome to another week of my Swift and iOS Development Newsletter!
Before we kick off this week I just wanted to say thank you to you if you were one of the people who shared the link the newsletter last week. I really appreciate all the support and really spurs me on to continue to provide you with a great set of links and articles every week.
If you didn’t tweet last week (or even if you did) and do want to show your support, it’d be be great if you could use the link below. I’d really appreciate it.
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