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
New Hardware On the Horizon?
So the wait is finally over. If the rumours are true, Thursday may see the introduction of new Apple hardware. I suspect I’m not going to be the only one watching. Fingers crossed.
apple.com
Business
28 Metrics That Matter For Your App
You’ve created and published your app. Now you want to see how it’s doing. In this article, @wrhodes breaks down the 28 most important metrics that you should be tracking.
savvyapps.com
Getting Started with Mobile Analytics
So you now know which metrics you should be tracking but how to you actually collect them? @KishinManglani provides a useful introduction to the whys and wherefores of Mobile Analytics Frameworks and a useful comparision of the top 3.
raywenderlich.com
Design
Copywriting in UI
Images, icons, colors and typography all play their part in UI design but underlying them all are the words we choose to include in our apps interface. @tubikstudio take a look at the importance of copywriting in UI design.
uxplanet.org
Code
Working with iOS Image Filters in Swift
The Core Image Framework in iOS is an immensely powerful framework that provides a bunch of features for manipulating and transforming images in iOS. In this post, Matt Nedrich from @atomicobject looks at how to leverage some of Core Images power to apply different filters to your images.
atomicobject.com
Building the Perfect Core Data Stack
For many years, Core Data has had a bit of a bad wrap, especially when compared to it’s more popular rivals. However, in recent years the Core Data framework has seen a number of pretty major changes. In this mini-series, @_bartjacobs uses these new features to put together his perfect Core Data stack.
cocoacasts.com
Tools
Whole-Module Optimisation in Swift 3
Introduced in Xcode 7, whole module optimisation is a mode of the Swift compiler that allows optimization analysis across all the source files in a given module leading to significant performance gains. In this post, the Swift team explain a little of how the optimisation process works in Swift 3.
swift.org
CocoaPods 1.1.0
This week has seen the next release of CocoaPods with improved support for extensions and frameworks as well as support for the latest Swift versions and Xcode 8. From the looks of the release notes, there have also been improvements in both performance and error handling that should make things a little more stable for large projects as well!
cocoapods.org
Libraries
Macaw
Macaw from @exyteHQ, is a powerful Swift library for working with vector graphics within your applications. It supports a number of nice features such vector drawing, SVG import and a range of other features that support the creation of powerful event driven animations.
github.com
DateTimePicker
It’s always nice to have options and DateTimePicker by @itsmeichigo provides a nice collection-view based alternative to Apple’s in-built UIDatePicker controller.
github.com
Videos
Mixins vs Inheritance
With the arrival of protocols in Swift, we have access to a new style of programming that promotes composition over inheritance. In this talk from FrenchKit 2016, @aligatr takes at how to use them. The slides for the talk can be found here.
youtube.com
Result Oriented Development
In this talk from try! Swift NYC, @casademora discusses the commonly used Result type and how we can use it to increase the power of our functional Swift code.
realm.io
Structs and Mutation
In this, one of the free videos from their ongoing Swift Talk video series, @floriankugler and @chriseidhof discuss structs and mutation in Swift. Worth watching.
objc.io
Server-Side Swift with Vapor
Want to get started with server-side Swift programming? In this video, @rwenderlich provides a great introduction to server-side Swift programming using Vapor.
raywenderlich.com
Other
Paying Down Technical Knowledge Debt
We’ve all heard of technical debt – the cruft that slowly builds up and makes it more and more difficult to add that next feature – but as @modocache points out, knowledge debt can be just as much of a problem. It’s an interesting concept and something that I’d not really thought about.
modocache.io