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
Marketing For Engineers
Indie app developers have to fufill many roles during the course of their working week. Beyond engineering, one of the most important of these is marketing – whether it be looking for beta testers, raising general app awareness or campaigns to grow their overall user base. One resource to help with this is this repo from @LisaDziuba. It’s a curated collection of practical and pragmatic marketing resources covering the entire app lifecycle. Definitely worth bookmarking.
github.com
How Often Should You Update Your App?
It’s the time of the year when many developers are thinking about updating their app ready for the release of iOS 11 but how often should you be pushing out app updates? @stuartkhall has done an interesting analysis of the top 200 apps within the store.
appbot.co
Sponsored Link
Buddybuild – a CI/CD Service Built for Swift Developers
Buddybuild is a continuous integration, continuous deployment and user feedback platform built specifically for mobile development teams. Buddybuild takes minutes to setup and automates the process of configuring a reliable and robust infrastructure for teams to build, test and deploy their apps. Thousands of companies, like Slack, Meetup and Mozilla trust buddybuild with their Swift development because it allows them to focus on what’s important – building apps users love.
Start your free 3 week trial today, and stay focused on building apps users love.
Design
Gamification in 2017: Top 5 Key Prinpciples
Gamification – the act of adding game-like mechanics to non-gaming apps – is a powerful tool for app developers wishing to increase user engagement and grow their user base. This article from @peteknudson outlines 5 key takeaways.
uxplanet.org
Swift
An Aside About flatMap and Monads
@cocoawithlove takes a look at monads – what they are, why their important and looks at how this applies to Swift.
cocoawithlove.com
Modelling State in Swift
State management – it’s the core of almost all Swift applications but designining your underlying data model can be difficult and it can be a source of a wide variety of bugs if your not careful. @johnsundell looks at some techniques for making your state-management code easier, less error prone and more robust.
swiftbysundell.com
Code
Watch Your Bluetooth!
With Apple announcing CoreBluetooth support in watchOS 4 at this years WWDC, @swiftingio takes a look at these new capabilities and provides a simple example of how to implement Bluetooth connectivity within your own iOS and watchOS apps.
swifting.io
Creating a Simple Game with Core ML in Swift 4
With many developers keen to get up to speed with Apple’s new machine learning framework Core ML, WWDC scholar @msweet168 shows how to integrated this powerful framework into a simple scavenger hunt game.
appcoda.com
Stack View Custom Spacing
UIStackView‘s have received a number of refinements in iOS 11 including the ability to add custom spacing between views. In this short tutorial, @kharrison provides a simple example of how to implement this for yourself.
useyourloaf.com
Testing
Unit Testing with Dependency Injection
Dependency injection can be an extremely useful technique, especially when it comes to unit testing, letting you easily manage the dependencies of the code under test. In this article, @dagostin shows you how.
agostini.tech
Tools
The Future of Teaching with Swift Playgrounds
With the introduction of the Swift Playgrounds app at last years WWDC, Apple has opened up a brand new world for those learning to code for the first time and at the same time provided a useful tool for seasoned developers wishing to get up to speed with new APIs and this year we have seen a further expansion to these capabilities. In this article @arepty rounds up the current state of play and provides some useful resources if your teaching the next generation of app entrepreneurs.
martiancraft.com
Libraries
ZIPFoundation
Based on Apple’s libcompression framework, ZIPFoundation by @weichsel is a swift library to create, read and modify ZIP archive files.
github.com
PMSuperButton
PMSuperButton by @codeido is a powerful UIButton that makes creating complex buttons with custom attributes super easy.
github.com
Freedom
As the name suggests, Freedom by @artsabintsev is a simple app extension that gives your app the freedom to open URLs in third-party browsers that your users have installed on their device.
github.com
Videos
Bring Machine Learning To Your iOS Apps
Machine learning was an important topic at this years WWDC and there has been a lot of buzz within the community ever since. If you’re looking to get started, this talk from @meghafon provides a great introduction covering everything from why and when to use machine learning in your apps through to creating custom machine learning models of your own.
realm.io
How to Clang Your Dragon
@harlanhaskins provides a gentle introduction to the world of compilers, looking at their basic structure and how to take and parse data into an LLVM intermediate representation. It’s a good insight into how everything works behind the scenes.
skilled.io