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
Plan to Move Swift-Evolution and Swift-User Mailing Lists to Discourse
If you’ve ever subscribed to the Swift mailing lists, you’ll know that the reading through the sheer volume of traffic on those lists is something akin to drinking from a fire hose. However, this week has seen some positive news on this front though with @tkremenek announcing plans to transition these mailing lists to Discourse, a move that for many will be most welcome.
swift.org
Swift Syntax Structured Editing Library
In other news this week, the swift-dev mailing lists have also seen the announcement of a new project to develop a Swift Syntax and Structured Editing library. In the short-term, the new library will be focused on infrastructure improvements for the Swift migrator but will hopefully bring additional tooling and performance benefits in the long-term.
swift.org
Business
Making More Outside the App Store
@pbones of Rogue Amoeba takes an introspective look at their audio recording app Piezo, and looks at what effect removing Piezo from the Mac App Store has had on apps sales and revenue.
rogueamoeba.com
Design
Great Alternatives To Hamburger Menus
Use of a hamburger menus prompts a lot of discussion in app design circles with their use often frowned upon due to reduced user engagement and disruptive workflows. However, avoiding the use of hamburger menus leads to the question of what design approaches to use instead. @kovlex provides some useful suggestions.
uxplanet.org
Swift
Getting to Swift 3
With the relentless development of Swift still ongoing, many businesses are faced with the prospect of migrate their existing Swift 2 code bases to Swift 3. This writeup from @chengyinliu, @kompfner and @michaelbachand provides an interesting insight into how the team at Airbnb have tackled the problem.
medium.com
Refactoring Singleton Usage in Swift
The use of the Singleton design pattern is commonly frowned on in software development due to it’s difficulty to test and the complexity it tends to introduce to the rest of the code base. However, singletons are commonly used within Apple’s frameworks and they are sometimes a necessary evil in our app designs. So given that we occasionally need to use them, how do we incorporate them into our code in a clean and testable way? @jesse_squires investigates.
jessesquires.com
Improving Completion Blocks in Swift
@amlcurran writes:
“Swift as a programming language focuses on making APIs descriptive and determinate. Completion blocks are less than perfect — but what is wrong with them, and how can we improve their usage?”
Code
Introduction to Protocol Buffers on iOS
Back in Issue 56 I mentioned that Apple had released their own implementation and tooling to support the use protobuf within your Swift code. If you haven’t had a chance to investigate yet, @vincentngo2 has written a useful tutorial to help you get started.
raywenderlich.com
Building a LISP from Scratch in Swift
@uraimo builds his own LISP interpreter from scratch and in doing so gains a much greater understanding of Abstract Syntax Trees, Lexers and Parsers in Swift.
uraimo.com
Libraries
Dotzu
Dotzue from remi936 brings in-app debugging to your iOS app providing in-built support for enhanced logging, network requests, device information and crash logs.
github.com
Hydra
Hydra from@danielemargutti is a lightweight library, written in Swift 3 that helps you write better asynchronous code through the use of promises and awaits. He’s also has an accompanying article that explains exactly how it works.
github.com
DeviceKit
DeviceKit from @dennis_weissman provides a value-type replacement for UIDevice supporting device, device family and device group detection, simulator detection along with battery state and battery level information.
github.com
AnimatedCollectionViewLayout
I couldn’t leave the libraries this week without including at least one animation library. Normally UICollectionView doesn’t have any transition effects when scrolling from one item to the next but AnimatedCollectionViewLayout by @jinw1990 provides a new UICollectionViewLayout subclass that adds a bunch of custom transitions / animations that you can use.
github.com
Videos
Network Testing
In this talk, @pepibumur looks at the problem of integration testing the components in your iOS app and specifically the problem of how to test that your networking code is actually performing as expected.
realm.io
Server-Side Swift
@jensravens talks all things server, looking at what server-side Swift brings to the party, whether it’s a viable alternative compared to other technologies such as Javascript / Node or Ruby / Rails and looks at some of the architectural design patterns applicable to server-side Swift. It’s a nice framework-agnostic view of the state of server-side Swift.
youtube.com
Other
Visualize, Document and Explore Your Software Architecture
Although this talk (video) from @simonbrown isn’t related to Swift or iOS directly, as someone who thinks in pictures, I really enjoyed it. When working as part of a large development team, I’ve often found that having a common vocabulary to help describe and document the structure of the code is extremely useful for helping people both understand and orient themselves within a code base and also helps to keep the overall design clean and managable. I agree with Simon that using all of UML is not usually the answer for this but I’ve often found that using a subset (think 80:20 rule) can be a useful approach.
realm.io