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 Case of the Stolen Source Code
It’s every developers nightmare. You accidentally click on a link or download malware-infested software and before you know it your product source code, the lifeblood of your business, has been stolen and held ransom. Sadly, this is the exact scenario that faced the team at @panic this week. Although many would have panicked (sorry – couldn’t resist ?), they have refused to deal with the blackmailer and have been open and honest about the whole situation. It’s a great example of how to keep your head in a crisis. I truely hope everything works out for them. ?
panic.com
Design
Mobile Design Best Practices
You can’t argue with the fact that good UX is often the differentiator between successful apps and unsuccessful ones. In this post, @101babich provides some more UX wisdom by sharing 7 UX design tips for creating great mobile user experiences.
adobe.com
How To Perfect Your Mobile App’s Login Screen
Sign-up and login screens are a tricky business. There a necessary evil but difficult to get right without having a detrimental affect on the user experience. So with pitfalls left and right, what are some of the things you should consider when building login and signup screens of your own? The team at @Appseecom have some advice.
prototypr.io
Architecture
MVC-C: Injecting Coordinator pattern in UIKit
A well written article from @radiantav looking at MVC-C and how coordinators can be used to simplify your app architecture. It’s an interesting read.
aplus.rs
Swift
Express Yourself Swift Style
@zmcartor digs into the inner workings of the Swift language and how type initialisation with literals works by taking a look at the ExpressibleBy__ family of protocols.
What’s New in Swift 4.0
Although Swift 4.0 is still in active development, it’s always useful to know what’s coming around the corner. @twostraws provide sa nice roundup of what’s on the way with some useful examples.
hackingwithswift.com
Swift 4.0 Playground
Following on from the link above, if you are keen to get your hands dirty with Swift 4 and want to play with some it’s new features, @olebegemann has published a Swift playground for you to experiment with.
github.com
Code
How To Secure iOS User Data: The Keychain and Touch ID
If your app is handling any sort of user data, securing that data from prying eyes should right up there on your priority list. With a combination of the iOS Keychain and Touch ID you have all the tools you need to achieve this with the minimum of fuss. @timmitra shows you how.
raywenderlich.com
UIKit Global Functions
@JordanMorgan10 takes a tour of the UIKit framework, looking at some of the more obvious and more obscure functions that hide away in the corners of this powerful framework.
medium.com
Libraries
ReusableViews
Idiomatic registration and reuse of de-queueable views along with cleaner view controller instantiation from storyboards…and not a force unwrap in sight! Some nice syntactic sugar from @WhatsASoftware
github.com
Pastel
A simple framework to simplify creating gradient animation effects like those seen in the Instragram app.
github.com
Anchors
Anchors from @onmyway133 goes beyond the typical syntactic sugar around NSLayoutConstraint to provide a powerful declarative and extensible code-based Auto Layout framework for iOS and Mac.
github.com
Videos
UIKonf
If you’re backlog of this years conference videos wasn’t big enough already, this week has seen the release of the full-length talks from this years UIKonf. I’ll be honest, I haven’t had a chance go to through all of them yet but those I have watched have been great.
youtube.com
Introduction to Functional Programming in Swift
In this @SwiftLDN talk, @aleludovici demystifies functional programming and in doing so provides a nice introduction to the topic if you’re just getting started.
skillsmatter.com
Comment
It’s been a relatively quiet week this week. Maybe it’s the lull before the storm of WWDC. Only three weeks to go now though! I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple have in store for us!