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.
Business
The Good, the Bad and the Clients
Working with the wrong client can have a serious impact to your business, wasting time and resources and potentially damaging your future prospects. So given these risks, how do you go about identifying the best clients to work with? @zmcartor provides some useful advice.
martiancraft.com
The App Store Optimization Stack
App store optimisation can be a great way of raising the profile of your app within the app store. In this, the first of a four-part series, @moritzdaan introduces a framework for optimising your app store listing and outlines a number of different tactics you can use to improve your app store presence. Worth keeping an eye out for the rest of the series.
mobilegrowthstack.com
Damage
A well written article by @mattgemmell on the state of the app store. It’s hard to argue with the points that Matt is making but the question remains – who is going to address these issues and how?
mattgemmell.com
Sponsored Link
New Book: Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering
Learn the powerful secrets of Apple’s software debugger, LLDB, that can get more information out of any program than you ever thought possible.
In Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering, you’ll come to realize debugging is an enjoyable process to help you better understand software. You’ll learn how to find bugs faster and will discover how other developers have solved problems similar to yours. You’ll also learn how to create custom, powerful, debugging scripts that will help you quickly find the secrets behind any bit of code that piques your interest.
raywenderlich.com
Swift
Picking the Right Way of Failing in Swift
Despite the type safety build into the Swift language, things can still go wrong. In this article @johnsundell looks at the different options for handling these failures in Swift.
medium.com
Code
Avoiding Massive View Controllers by Refactoring
As your project grows, Massive View Controller syndrome is an ever present spectre that can rear it’s head before you realise it. In this article, @roch4brun walks through an example project demonstrating a number of techniques that you can use to avoid this bloat in your own code.
medium.com
How to Build a Compass App in Swift
@zntfdr dives into the CoreLocation framework with a step by step guide on how to use the frameworks CLLocationManager class to report and display heading information to your user.
medium.com
Preserves Superview Layout Margins
Ever wondered what the “Preserve Superview Margins” checkbox in Interface Builder does? Wondered when should you use it and why does it doesn’t seem to do anything most of the time? @kharrison has the answers.
useyourloaf.com
Sponsored Link
New Video Course: Reactive Programming in iOS with RxSwift
Writing asynchronous and concurrent code is tough. Reactive extensions for Swift and Cocoa Touch (RxSwift and RxCocoa) make it much easier—fun even! Get up to speed on RxSwift, RxCocoa, and additional Rx libraries with the new video course, Reactive Programming in iOS with RxSwift. You’ll learn how to effectively use reactive extensions in your iOS app projects. You’ll also get lifetime access to the course and free updates.
Save $15 with the coupon code: SWIFTDEVELOPMENTS
udemy.com
Tools
Using SwiftLint and Danger for Swift Best Practices
In this article, @candostEN looks at how to add some automated code quality to your Swift projects with SwiftLint and Danger.
medium.com
App Iconizer
If you’re not a design wizard, App Iconizer is a useful online tool to have bookmarked. It lets you upload a single icon design and automatically generate a full icon set for submission to the app store saving you both time and effort.
appiconizer.com
Libraries
FBSnapshotViewer
If you’re using FBSnapshotTestCase for your UI testing and you’re struggling with parsing the console log, you’ll want to also take a look at FBSnapshotViewer by @antondomashnev. It’s a useful little macOS application that lets you see the failing snapshot tests directly from your macOS task bar. No log mining required.
github.com
BluetoothKit
Although Apple’s CoreBluetooth APIs do a great job, it still takes a lot of work to get things up and running. This is where BluetoothKit by @rhummelmose comes in providing a simpler, more modern, closure-based API to Apple’s Bluetooth stack and as an added bonus it’s written entirely in Swift.
github.com
NotificationBanner
NotifificationBanner is Swift 3 notification banner library from Dalton Hinterscher. It’s lightweight, customizable and makes displaying notification banners and drop-down alerts a breeze.
github.com
Videos
Craft Conference Videos
Sometimes it’s important to expand our focus beyond Swift and Apple development. The Craft Conference does just that, covering the full gamut of software craftsmanship including the tools, processes, methods and practices. There’s some great videos in here, especially if you’re working as part of a larger team.
craft-conf.com
Protocols with Associated Types
From App Builder 2017, @terhechte talks about Swift protocols with associated types, explaining what they are, how to introduce them and how to use them in your Swift code. Make sure you check out the rest of the videos from App Builder 2017 as well. They’re great!
youtube.com
Building a Swift Web API
In this talk, @kylefuller shares his experience of building web APIs using Swift and discusses some techniques for designing those APIs to cope with future demands. Some great tips as more and more Swift developers expand their skills to the back-end.
realm.io
Other
Crafting Better Code Reviews
If you’re developing as part of a team, it’s likely that code reviews form part of your teams development process but how often have you stopped to think about how you could make those code reviews better? This is the same question that faced @vaidehijoshi so she decided to investigate.
medium.com