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
App Transport Security Deadline Extended
Back in the summer, Apple announced that all apps would be required to use secure connections to servers by January 1st 2017. However, over the Christmas period, Apple quietly announced an extension to this deadline providing developers with more time add secure connections to their apps. To date, Apple haven’t announced a new date for this extended deadline but if your app isn’t yet using secure connections now is the time to get them in place as this will no doubt become a hard requirement in the future.
apple.com
Business
Keeping the Conversation Moving During a Competitive Analysis
Conducting design discovery conversations with clients and performing competitor analysis can be a great way to identify the features that should and shouldn’t be included in your app. However, it can also be a difficult task to corral all the different participants involved whilst simultaneously providing structure and direction to the conversation. @Big_Nerd_Des has a useful approach that can help.
bignerdranch.com
Design
Best Practices for Minimalist App Design
Minimalism combined with great usability can provide the foundation for a stellar app design but minimalism is difficult to get right. @101babich provides some tips, best practices and basic rules of thumb to keep in mind when employing minimalist design for yourself.
babich.biz
Swift
NS_SWIFT_NAME
@JordanMorgan10 takes a look at interoperability between Objective-C and Swift by looking at the NS_SWIFT_NAME macro and how you can use it to control the mapping between the Objective-C method names and their Swift equivalents.
medium.com
Protocols are more than Bags of Syntax
@olebegemann highlights a conversation that has been happening on the Swift Evolution mailing list about using protocols in your code, specifically how protocols should encapsulate both syntax and semantics.
oleb.net
Code
Tracking Santa With Realm
Ok, I know Christmas has come and gone but leading up to Christmas @mrh_is put together a nice 4-part series (Part 1,
Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) showing you how to get started with the Realm platform. Although Santa is probably back at home sleeping by now, It’s still a useful introduction.
realm.io
RxSwift Primer
One of the biggest themes of last year was the rise of Functional Reactive Programming in Swift. If you’ve yet to dip a toe into this new paradigm, @caseyliss has a great series of posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) to help you get started.
caseyliss.com
In-App Purchase in iOS with Swift 3
In-App purchase is one of primary routes that developers have for generating revenue from their apps. In this tutorial, @fvimagination shows you how to implement in-app purchases using Swift 3.
tutsplus.com
iOS Location Tracking
When it comes to building a location-based app on iOS there’s a lot more to consider than simply MapKit and Core Location. In this article, @bohdan_orlov provides a great approach for balancing different location tracking requirements whilst highlighting some of the pitfalls to avoid when creating location tracking apps of your own.
medium.com
Libraries
This Year in Mobile: 10 Unmissable Libraries for iOS Developers
With 2016 rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror, I thought we’d kick off our look at popular Swift libraries in 2017 with this roundup post by @sugrue that looks at some of the most popular iOS libraries of 2016.
dzone.com
NEKit
NEKit builds on top of Apple’s NETunnelProvider class from their Network Extension Framework to create tunnelled network connections that bypass network filtering and censorship whilst remaining as un-opinionated as possible.
github.com
Videos
Building a Production Server Swift App – Lessons Learnt
The popularity of server-side Swift has been increasing over the last 12 months and in this talk, @jeffburg shares some of his experiences of running server-side Swift on Linux including using it for production web-apps and integration with Microsoft exchange servers.
realm.io
Comment
Hey, we’re back! Happy New Year! I really hope you and your family had a great end to 2016 and really hope you have a stellar 2017!
I’ve spent some time over the holiday season thinking about some of the things I wanted to achieve in the coming year and never one to shy away from a challenge have set myself a few big goals this year (in addition to continuing with this newsletter, writing some more on the blog). Time to buckle down and do some work! Bring it on 2017!