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
App Store Review – Progress For Developers
For many years now, Developers have had to run the gauntlet of the App Store Review process. Inconsistent decisions and long review times have meant getting your application from Xcode to the app store have been a relatively painful process. In recent weeks though things seem to be improving. @donmcallister sums up the current state of play.
medium.com
User Retention in Mobile Apps
So you’ve been working flat out for months on end and your app has finally shipped. The thing is, that that’s only half the story. Once your app has shipped (and to some extent even before then) there are two key things you need to crack if your app is going to be a success – getting people to use your app in the first place and retaining those users in order to build up your user base. In this article, @shlema tackles the second of these problems and provides some useful tips on how to ensure your users continue to use your app beyond the critical first few days.
stanfy.com
Design
How Fast Should Your UI Animations Be?
I’ve talked previously about how animation in your apps can be a highly useful tool in conveying information and context to your users. Part of that experience is the timings of those animations. Too short and it feels unnatural and rushed. Too long and your users may become frustrated. In this article, @vlh helps us navigate this quagmire by taking a look at the art (and science) of UI animation timings.
valhead.com
Swift
ABI Compatibility: Whoopdty Do, What Does It All Mean?
In last weeks newsletter I mentioned the announcement that ABI compatibility for Swift 3.0 was being delayed. But what is ABI compatibility? In this post, @benatbensnider explains what ABI compatibility means and also looks at whether we should really care about it.
bensnider.com
Swift Functional Programming – Basic Concepts
If you’ve got a history of object-oriented programming then functional programming may be seem like a bit of foreign concept. With that said, all the cool kids keep mentioning it so there must be something there right? In this article, @AndyyHope takes some good humoured look at some of the basics.
medium.com
A Beginner’s Guide to Scripting in Swift
With Swift now open source it has opened the door for using Swift in a range of new contexts. One context that hasn’t yet had much attention yet though is scripting. @allonsykraken takes a look.
Swift Documentation
As @jesse_squires points out – “a library is only as good as it’s documentation” and having great documentation can go along way toward encouraging adoption of your library. In this article Jesse walks us through how to use @onevcat‘s VVDocumenter-Xcode plugin and @realm‘s Jazzy document generation utility to automatically generate your documentation. Great article.
jessesquires.com
Libraries
FlatBuffersSwift
If you’ve played with data serialisation using either Google’s Protocol Buffers or it’s compatriot FlatBuffers before you’ll like this. As you can probably guess, FlatBuffersSwift from @iceX33 brings FlatBuffers to the Swift ecosystem, providing a high speed, highly efficient, way to serialise and deserialise structured objects to and from binary. If you’re interested, there’s great accompanying post that’s worth reading.
Simplicity
Adding the Facebook and Google SDKs to your applications in order to support login can add significantly to the size of your applications. Simplicity by @edwardstarcraft attempts to address this problem by providing a simple and light-weight way to add Facebook and Google login to your applications whilst also providing the flexibility to further extend the framework to support OAuth2 and other custom authentication protocols. Worth a look of your looking for potential authentication solutions in your app.
github.com
Videos
Advanced Graphics with Core Animation
Although animation APIs are baked into UIKit, dropping down to Core Animation allows you to achieve whole range of other effects that simply wouldn’t be possible through the use of UIKit alone. In this video, @TimOliverAU explains how Core Animation works, introduces some of it’s key concepts and shows us some examples of just what can be achieved.
realm.io
Table View Controllers in Swift
Table Views and UITableViewController are the backbone of many iOS applications but without care tend to lead to large view controllers with multiple responsibilities. In this live coding demo, @chriseidhof brings to bear some Swift and functional programming knowledge by looking at how to work with table views in a more Swifty way.
Other
Software Licenses Explained in English
Having a good understanding of the licensing terms for the third party libraries you including within your application is an important task if you are going to keep yourself out of hot water. And the thing is, it doesn’t get any easier. I’ve been writing software for getting on for 20 years now but I’m not a lawyer and I still have to re-read the different software licenses to remember what you can and can’t do under each of them. With this in mind, I really liked this resource from @kevinverse which helps save a chunk of time by explaining each of the major software licenses in plain english.
Comment
It’s been great to see work on the Swift Package Manager ploughing ahead this week with the recent addition of support for creating Objective-C and C++ packages. I’ve also been really enjoying the live streaming of UIKonf talks. I really hope they get released as there are many I’d want to watch again. On top of that, there have also been some great articles and videos this week so let’s take a look.