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
Updated App Store Review Guidelines
Amongst all the news and excitement of last weeks WWDC events, Apple has published a new version of the App Store Review guidelines. The changes are actually pretty extensive ranging from minor tweaks to some completely new rules. AppStoreReviewGuidelinesHistory.com provides a nice summary of the differences.
appstorereviewguidelineshistory.com
How to Make $80,000 Per Month On The App Store
I think it’s fair to say that over the last year or so Apple have been making a concerted effort to improve things for developers attempting to make their living within the store. The latest re-design of the App Store is just one example of that but with $21 billion being paid out in the last year, the store is inevitably a target for those wishing to game the system and scam the unwary. @johnnylin provides a number of such examples – examples that I really hope Apple clamp down on if they can. Incidents like these help no-one. They erode users confidence and hurt those developers who are trying to deliver high quality apps for their users.
medium.com
Design
Apple UI Design Resources
With iOS 11 beta now available, you might be turning your mind toward app updates and re-designs over the summer. If this sounds familiar you’ll probalby want to grab the new UI materials that Apple have published including templates for Photoshop, Sketch and Adobe XD.
apple.com
Swift
What’s New in Swift 4
One of the other nice little presents that arrived this week was the release of Swift 4. The good news is that the transition is going to be nowhere near as painful as the transition of Swift 2 to Swift 3 and the nice thing about the Swift open-source project is that we already had visibibility of many of the changes that were coming. If you’ve not been keeping track though, @ecerney has written a good summary of most of the changes.
raywenderlich.com
Code
What’s New in iOS 11 for Developers
In addition to simple API changes, iOS 11 has also introduced a number of new frameworks for us to play with including PDF presentation and rendering, NFC support and some of the higher-profile additions such as ARKit for augmented reality functionality and Core ML for machine learning. @twostraws provides a nice round-up with some useful accompanying code examples.
hackingwithswift.com
Notable UI Kit Additions
Unsurprisingly, iOS 11 has delivered a raft of new API changes across a wide range of frameworks. In this artice, @JordanMorgan10 has focused on UIKit, and provides a useful summary of some of the changes.
medium.com
A Deep Dive Into Grand Central Dispatch
Grand Central Dispatch is one of the most powerful Apple frameworks for adding concurrent execution to your iOS apps. @johnsundell takes a deep dive into the framework, covering queues, dispatch groups and more.
swiftbysundell.com
Tools
Xcode GitHub Integration
For me, Xcode 9 with all it’s new performance improvements and productivity features (including refactoring – finally!!) is a BIG step forward. One of the new features is the integration with GitHub. I’ve been playing with this week and in true Apple style I’m pleased to say it ‘just works’ but as @danielpunkass points out, I’m not sure it has gone far enough. Would love to see Daniel’s ideas, especially the provisioning idea implemented.
indiestack.com
Testing
How To Mock and Stub a System Class in Swift
One of the keys to unit testing your Swift code is isolation – the ability to separated the code under test from its dependencies so that you can control the environment in which your test code executes. Sometimes, this can be difficult, especially when using some of Apple’s framework classes but that’s not to say it can’t be done. @_bartjacobs has published a useful three-part series to show you how.
cocoacasts.com
Video
The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2017
I really enjoyed this when @daringfireball did this last year and it’s great to see the tradition continuing with relaxed, informative and funny conversation with with Apple’s Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi. What I like most about this interview is that it drops some of the formality and polish of the keynote / state of the union and gives a more personable discussion with some of Apple’s leadership team. Great job.
daringfireball.net
Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel
To wrap up this week we have the Realm WWDC 2017 Swift Panel with @kamilah, @eridius, @jesse_squires and @clattner_llvm collectively discussing WWDC, Swift and the age old tabs vs spaces debate ?
realm.io
Comment
What a week! If your anything like me you’ll have spent the week catching up with session videos and playing with all the new APIs and SDKs that Apple have dropped. I’ll say now, I’m a big fan of the Xcode changes this time around and I’ve been pleasantly suprised at the difference that wireless debugging has made to my workflow! Big thumbs up from me. It doesn’t look like I’m alone with diving into all the new goodies though and this week there have been a bunch of great articles rounding up much of the WWDC mayhem. Enjoy.