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
Search Ads
After their announcement back in June, Search Ads are set to hit the app store on Oct 5th. Limited to the US app-store only at this point, there is a $100 credit available if you want to give them ago.
apple.com
Realm Mobile Platform
It’s been a pretty big week for the team at @realm. Not only have they open sourced Realm Core, the core component of their client-side database for iOS, but they have also launched their new Realm Mobile Platform. This later offering is actually pretty big news with a new self-hosted Object Server providing developers with advanced features such as full, automatic, server-side data synchronisation, conflict resolution and support for authentication against third party services such as Facebook, Google and Apple iCloud. I’ve not played with it yet but it definitely looks promising.
realm.io
Business
The Full Guide to Managing Remote Developers Effectively
In the last few years, prevalence of remote development teams has definitely increased. Whilst remote working provides many advantages for the individuals and teams involved it can also introduces some unique challenges when it comes to managing such teams. @mary_goldspink provides a few pointers.
codementor.io
The Weird and Wacky World of App Marketing by Jeremy Olson
Recorded this years RWDevCon 2016, this is a great non-technical talk from @jerols in which he imparts some of his experience of marketing apps on the app store. In the talk he discusses the key think you need to think about when it comes to marketing your app and some of the other things you need to focus on to help toward getting your app featured.
raywenderlich.com
Design
How to Use Animation to Improve UX
If I’m honest, I’ve no idea how @101babich continues to publish such high-quality app design articles so frequently. With that said, the good news for us is that we get to take advantage. In this weeks article, Nick looks at using animation with our app designs.
babich.biz
Code
Case Study: SqueezeOutSwitch – Animation in Code
Subtle use of animation in your interfaces is extremely powerful, from the largest view transitions to those little touches that add that final bit of polish to your applications. In this article, the team at @tubikstudio help with a little polish of their own providing insight how to animate a switch transition.
medium.com
Why I’m not a React Native Developer
Since it’s release React Native has become an increasingly popular choice for developers providing the ability to build native UIs using web technologies. However, making the jump to a React Native development workflow is a big decision and one not to be taken lightly. @AriVocals evaluates the pros and cons.
github.io
Best Practices & Pain Points in Mobile Networking: REST API Failure Situations
RESTful APIs play a major role in almost all iOS apps whether it be consuming data from a web service or uploading data to a back-end server. However their simplicity along with the inherent connectivity issues of mobile networking, makes handling errors an important topic when writing code to interact with these APIs. @icanzilb takes a detailed look at the issue.
realm.io
Testing
Mocks in Swift via Protocols
When it comes to unit tests, having the ability to mock out dependencies within your code is a powerful technique for exercising all the corner-cases in our code. With Objective-C this was achieve through a combination of external libraries such as OCMock or OCMockito and some Objective-C run-time magic but with the introduction of Swift a lot of things have changed. In this article, @_eliperkins explores this brave new world and looks at how we can using Swift protocols to fulfil our our mocking needs.
eliperkins.me
Tools
Debugging a Specific Instance with Scripted Breakpoints
Although a little hidden away, Xcode has a number of highly powerful features that can help with debugging your applications. One of these is scripted breakpoints, and in this article, @_mochs walks us through this feature using it to debug instances deep inside an application.
pspdfkit.com
Libraries
CostumeKit
There’s a number of libraries out there to help with theming the color scheme and fonts for your apps. CostumeKit by @jakemarsh, takes minimalist approach to this problem, providing a simple set of protocols to help with this problem.
littlebitesofcocoa.com
Videos
Refactoring at Scale – Lessons Learned Rewriting Instagram’s Feed
I was lucky enough to see this talk in person when @_ryannystrom delivered it at @iosdevuk. It’s a great talk and includes some clever use of array diffs in conjunction with collection views to help simplify the Instagram apps architecture. Worth watching.
realm.io
Other
Burnout
I don’t often link to the same person twice within a single issue of Swift Developments but this week I’m going to make an exception. With long hours, multiple projects, constant pressure deliver and an ever changing technological landscape, burnout is an ever present danger for many Swift and iOS developers. In this, a recent lightening talk from NSSpain’16, @icanzilb looks at how to identify some of the warnings signs in you, your friends and your co-workers.
medium.com
Algorithms in Plain English: Time Complexity and Big-O Notation
You may have heard of Big-O notation before. It’s commonly used to describe the performance characteristics of different algorithms but if you haven’t come from a computer science background you might not know your O(n) from your O(1). @MikeOlor provides a nice introduction.
freecodecamp.com