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Design
The 5 Most Common Mistakes UX Designers Made During 2016
@101babich looks back at 2016, highlighting the 5 most common mistakes in UX design along with some tips on how to avoid them.
adobe.com
Code
How to Build a SpriteKit Game in Swift 3
In this 3-part series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), @marcvandehey goes from initial idea to game prototype using the power of SpriteKit to develop game logic, physics and add sound. A great tutorial series if you’re looking to get started with SpriteKit.
smashingmagazine.com
NSRegularExpression
Whichever way you look at it, regular expressions aren’t the simplest of things to get your head around but they can be useful in certain circumstances. @nnnnnnnn shows us how to get started with Cocoa’s manifestation of regular expressions, the NSRegularExpression class.
nshipster.com
iOS Location Tracking
@bohdan_orlov provides some useful tips and tricks for combining server-side push notifications and client-side location tracking to develop location aware applications on iOS.
medium.com
Tools
Sourcery
Meta-programming comes to Swift with this new tool from @merowing_. Sourcery adds templating capabilities to your Swift source code allowing you write your template code once and then generate your final code from these templates, helping you reduce the amount of boilerplate code you have to write.
github.com
Libraries
XestiMonitors
XestiMonitors by @MSAeBardX is a framework that provides a number of fully-featured monitor classes to wrap many of UIKit’s native notifications making it signficantly easier to monitor and respond to common system events.
github.com
Kickstarter for iOS
One of the big announcements this week was the engineering team at KickStarter open sourcing the code bases for both their Android and iOS apps. The repo for the iOS app can be found here and is worth poking around if you are interested in seeing how other teams are architecting their applications.
github.com
NVActivityIndicatorView
Looking for a progress indicator view for your app? Look no further. NVActivityIndicatoryView from @ninjaprox is a collection of over 30 different customisable progress indicators in one simple Swift framework.
github.com
Videos
Throwing Auto Layout Out of the Window
In this Swift Language User Group Talk, @nickdsnyder discusses Auto Layout and explains why, after a lot of frustration, the team at LinkedIn decided to build their own open-source alternative – LayoutKit.
realm.io
Contributing to Swift
On 3rd December, the Swift Open Source project reached it’s first birthday. The project has come along way since it’s inception with growing number of contributions and suggestions from the Swift community. If you’re looking to get involved, @ayanonagon‘s talk from Do iOS 2016 has some great tips to help you get started.
youtube.com
Other
Developers’ Side Projects
“Most developers think that the work they do at work belongs to their employer, but anything they work on at home or on their own time is theirs. This is wrong enough to be dangerous.”
In this article, @spolsky provides a sobering reminder that if you’re working for an employer you need to make sure you know where you stand with regards to side projects otherwise you might be getting yourself into hot water.
joelonsoftware.com
Comment
Welcome to another week of Swift Developments!
With the holiday season upon us, I’m planning on having a bit of down-time over the holiday period so this is going to be the last issue of Swift Developments for 2016. (Yeah yeah, I know…. this is you right now… ?)
Don’t worry though! The good news is that I’ll be back in the new year with the next issue due in your inbox on Jan 3rd! ??.
Before then though, I just wanted to say thanks for supporting Swift Developments over the last year, enjoy this weeks links, and have a very happy holiday season! See you in the new year!