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.
WWDC
Get ready for a New App Discovery System Overlooked at Apple’s WWDC 2016
Once we’ve got over the inevitable rush of basic sticker apps that will hit the iMessage app store, there are actually some large implications for app discovery and discoverability going forwards. @BrianRoemmele has more details.
medium.com
New in Notifications
One of the major things that WWDC has brought us is a complete overhaul of the notification APIs into a single notifications interface called User Notifications and with the re-design of the lock screen in iOS 10 leveraging this new notification system will become even more important. @fichek has a good summary of the changes.
fichek.com
A quick look at UIViewPropertyAnimator
One of the other goodies that was released this week and hasn’t got much press is the update to UIKit for the brand new UIViewPropertyAnimator. This new addition makes adding gesture-based and interruptible animations significantly easier in iOS 10. In this article, @marmelroy takes a quick look at what is possible and if you’re interested, you can find more detail in the video for WWDC 2016 Session 216.
medium.com
WWDC 2016: Developer Reading List
With all the new changes that were released it is easy to be overwhelmed with all the information. With this article, the team at @bignerdranch have some great tips for navigating the mass of information.
bignerdranch.com
Design
Pixel Density, Demystified
I didn’t want to fill all of this weeks issue with articles relating to WWDC, especially when I found a couple of great design articles this week. The first is this one from @pnowelldesign that looks at pixel density and its implications when designing apps for modern iOS devices.
medium.com
Designing in Color
The second design article I wanted to include this week was this one from @JonathanZWhite. Color can play a key role in defining the look and feel of our apps and this article, Jonathan provides some great tips on how to select and work with color pallets of our own.
freecodecamp.com
Code
How to Architect Data Sources in Swift
There are some really great persistence frameworks now available for iOS but without special care you can end up leaking many of their implementation details into your wider code base. In this article, @dcorder looks at how to avoid those issues by designing your apps in such a way that your persistence library could be replaced with the minimum of fuss.
medium.com
A Swift-y Approach to Dependency Injection
In this article, @_danielhall looks at some swifty ways of using dependency injection within your code base to make things more flexible, reusable and above all, testable.
danielhall.io
How We Migrated to Parse Open Server
The closure of Parse is still a major issue for many developers leaving them faced with the prospect of migrating to other platforms but what’s the migration process actually like? In this article, @vixentael and the team at @stanfy reveal all.
stanfy.com
Tools
Xcode Extensions
In line with Apple’s theme of opening things up to developers, WWDC also saw the announcement of Xcode extensions. Currently, this provides relatively limited scope (in that it is constrained to simple source code edits) but my hope is that they are opened up in the longer-term. In the mean time though, @xenadu02 starts to tackle this new (and far more constrained) interface.
russbishop.net
Running the Swift 3.0 Migrator on a Standalone Swift File
With Swift 3.0 now easily available to all as part of the Xcode 8 beta, many developers will be migrating their Swift code from 2.3 -> 3.0. This works great for Xcode and Playground projects but isn’t so good for standalone Swift Scripts. In this article @ayanonagon has a great tip for how to convert standalone Swift files.
ayaka.me
Libraries
IBAnimatable
I mentioned IBAnimatable by @jake_lin back in January but since then it has reached version 2.3 and is sporting a new transition feature that is worth mentioning. In addition to its existing array of animation features IBAnimatable now supports the ability to configure custom transition animation and gesture interactions in Interface Builder.
github.com
Design Patterns in Swift
Back in the day, the GoF book was one of my first introductions to design patterns in software development. In this project, @nsmeme takes some of those same ideas and re-implements them in Swift.
github.com
Videos
Swift Language User Group WWDC Swift Panel 2016
So if you missed it this week Realm and their Cocoa lead @simjp put together a great panel discussion with @ayanonagon, @jesse_squires, @sandofsky and @NatashaTheRobot discussing Swift, it’s evolution and looking at Swift 3 and beyond. It’s interesting to hear their thoughts.
realm.io
Realm Live: WWDC
Not wanting to swamp this entirely with videos from the team at Realm, but they’ve also been doing a great series of interviews over the past week with different luminaries from around the Apple development community. They’re pretty short so worth having a look in between all those WWDC videos.
realm.io
Finally
NSHipster Quiz #8
I actually surprised myself with this quiz from @nnnnnnnn in that I got a number of them correct… but then again, even a wild guess will sometimes be right!
Comment
Welcome to another issue of the newsletter! So it’s been a busy week with all the madness of WWDC and boat-loads of session videos to get through. I’m still super excited to see what we can all build. In the mean time, this weeks newsletter contains a mix of WWDC reaction as well as some other great articles from around the community. Enjoy.