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
How to Get More App Downloads By Rethinking Your Mobile Marketing Strategy
After 9 years, the complete overhaul of the app store in iOS 11 will undoubtedly bring significant changes to the crowded and competitive app-store ecosystem but with fewer apps on the main page every day, many developers are starting to look for alternatives to the traditional app-store optimisation approach. @mada299 outlines some alternative strategies to consider.
medium.com
Design
The Psychological Principles Every UI/UX Designers Needs to Know
Psychology plays a significant role in a users perception of your app. Through a better understanding of how and why a user perceives your app design in a particular way you can better understand the changes that you need to make to take your app from average to stellar. @tnsrig explains some of the not so obvious psychological principles that are at play.
medium.com
Architecture
VIPER-S – Writing Your Own Architecture To Understand It’s Importance
In this two-part series (Part 1, Part 2), @bitwaker goes on a journey of discovery, looking at why we need application architecture, the different domains and roles involved and how we can use these concepts to organise our code and make tangible decisions within our code base.
thinkandbuild.it
Code
JSON Parsing in Swift 4
Search on GitHub and you’ll find a wide range of JSON parsing libraries available. With the arrival of the new Codable protocol in Swift 4, most of these libraries are obsolete as these capabilities are baked directly into the Swift language itself. @trozware explores the new Swit 4 features.
troz.net
One Wierd Trick To Lose Size
However you look at it, app sizes are growing with many apps well over Apple’s 100MB cellular download limit. However, bandwidth is not an infinite resource and there are lots of things you can do to reduce the size of your app download without negatively effecting the user experience. @sandofsky shares some of the techniques he and his colleagues employed during the development and release of their latest app – Halide – an app that has been complemented for it’s small download size.
medium.com
Tools
Fastlane Precheck
I’ve mentioned Fastlane a number of times in previous issues but this week has seen the capabilities of this extremely useful toolset expand even further with the addition of fastlane precheck a new addition to review your app for common causes of rejection prior to submission. Looks super useful.
fabric.io
Flawless
The transition from app design to implementation is never a precise one and it’s easy for slight differences to sneak into your final implementation. To help identify these differences and help you maintain pixel-perfect implementations there’s Flawless, a new tool from the team at @flawlessappio that lets you perform real-time pixel-by-pixel comparisons of the expected design and the final implementation.
flawlessapp.io
iOS Simulator Powerups
If you’ve done any sort of iOS development you will no doubt be familiar with the iOS simulator – but are you as familiar as you thought? The iOS smiulator has a useful companion – the simctl tool – that lets you control the simulator from the command line and lets you stitch together some powerful workflows. @JordanMorgan10 takes a look.
medium.com
Libraries
Metron
Metron by @toineheuvelmans is a comprehensive collection of Swift geometric functions and types that enhance and extend the 2D geometric primitives provided within the Core Graphics framework.
github.com
URWeatherView
Crank up your animation mojo with this nice little demo app from @jegumhon which shows you you how to add weather effects such as rain, snow, lightening and dust into your UIViews. Break out your weather gear!
github.com
ScrollableDatePicker
Using UICollectionView under the hood, ScrollableDatePicker is a horizontally scrolling date picker by @dmitry_ivanenko. Looks good.
Videos
Highlights from Realm Live at WWDC and AltConf
With WWDC and AltConf on at the same time, it’s almost impossible to keep up with all the great talks that are available. The good news is that the team at @realm have put together a nice summary of their live-streamed talks from AltConf as well as interviews with some of the developers visiting San Jose for the week.
realm.io
Other
Scott Forstall on the History of the iPhone
In his first public interview for over 5 years, @forstall talks to @markoff about the theatre, NeXT, Apple, the history of the iPhone. Oh and sharks? ? It’s a great talk and an interesting look back at the history of the iPhone.
facebook.com