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.
News
Server Notification and Enhanced Receipts for Subscriptions
This week has seen Apple introducing new server notifications and enhanced receipt validation responses targeted at providing real-time information about the status of a users auto-renewable subscriptions. It’s a welcome addition and should facilitate some additional in-app promotion capabilities for those developers who have chosen to go down the subscription route.
apple.com
New Customer Support Role in iTunes Connect
iTunes connect has also seen some improvements this week. Following on from the recent app-store enhancements to allow developers to respond to user app reviews, Apple have now split this task out into a new dedicated Customer Support role within iTunes Connect. It looks like users with App Manager or Marketer roles are being grandfathered in but anyone added after July 13th will have to have this role manually assigned.
apple.com
Apple Machine Learning Journal
Apple placed alot of emphasis on machine learning at WWDC and it’s pretty obvious that they see machine learning (in both it’s obvious and less obvious forms) as an important part of their ecosystem going forward. In support of this, they have this week published the first issue of a new Machine Learning Journal specifically focused on this topic. It’s an interesting read but there’s no RSS feed just yet so you’ll just have to book mark it for now.
machinelearning.apple.com
Business
The Problem With Abandoned Apps
An interesting article from @xdevmag on the current state of the app store and Apple’s approach to dealing with abandoned apps. He’s got some good points and it’s easy to see why for many, the removal of abandoned apps from the store might not be something they actually want.
tidbits.com
How to Get Your First 1000 Customers
In this article, @GlebBudman provides a rundown of some of the different options at your disposal for obtaining your first 1000 customers. Although it’s pitched at launching a startup, almost all of it is equally applicable to launching your app as well.
backblaze.com
Design
Mobile UX Design: Key Principles
Whether you’re a designer, developer or an indie wearing multiple hats, having a solid understanding of mobile UX design is an important part of being a modile app developer. In this article, @101babich takes a look at some of the essentials.
uxplanet.org
Swift
JSON to Swift with Decoder and Decodable
A few weeks ago, @gregheo published a great article on how Swift values get encoded to JSON using JSONEncoder and the Encodable and Encoder protocols. This week, Greg has completed the set with this new article looking at how JSON gets decoded back into Swift.
swiftunboxed.com
Code
How to implement expandable menu on iOS
If you’ve ever used the AirBnB app you might have noticed the nice expandable menu they have implemented at the top of the screen. In this article, Evgeny Matviyenko explains how to implement this kind of menu for yourself.
uptech.team
Writing a Lightweight Markup Parser in Swift
@gonzalezreal walks through the basics of writing a lightweight markup parser in Swift including the basics of tokenization, parsing and rendering.
medium.com
On-Demand Resources in iOS
Introduced in iOS 9 and tvOS, the concept of on-demand resources allow you to tag specific assets within your app, have them hosted on Apple’s servers and then download those resources on demand making your iniital app download smaller and faster. @jamesgoodwill walks through the basics.
raywenderlich.com
Tools
Xcode 9’s Manual Provisioning Changes
With the introduction of Xcode 9, Apple have made a number of improvements with regards to most developers favourite activity – provisioning. @coryb takes a look at some of the changes.
martiancraft.com
Customizing the File Header Comment and Other Text Macros in Xcode 9
If you’re not a fan of the default file header comment created by Xcode, @olebegemann has published a useful article that shows you how to customise this and some of the other text macros used in Xcode 9.
oleb.net
Libraries
ARRuler
You’ll no doubt have seen various examples of measurment apps using Apple’s new ARKit. If you want an example of how this is implemented, ARRuler is the project for you.
github.com
Highlight
Behind the scenes I’ve been working on bit of a side project that has included the need for a number of keynote slides with syntax highlighted code examples which I rapidly found to be a pain. I did a bit of hunting around and found this project by Taegon Kim which provides a useful little Mac app and the power of highlight.js to your code snippets. Useful little tool.
github.com
Videos
Creating Animations in iOS
In this talk, @johnsundell walks through a number of tools, techniques and workflows for adding smooth and engaging animations to your iOS apps.
youtube.com
5 Secrets of Reactive Programming
@gregheo imparts some of his reactive programming knowledge by looking at 5 of the most important concepts of that underpin reactive programming and in doing so tries to extract some of universal patterns and concepts that can be applied regardless of the type of code you’re writing.
skilled.io
Finally
Finding Your Way…
A couple of really great demos from @AndrewProjDent combining ARKit with Core Location. ?
twitter.com
Comment
I hope you’ve had a great week! My self control finally caved this week and I’ve taken the jump and installed the latest iOS 11 beta onto my main device. I’ve found a few issues but so far so good. Fingers crossed nothing else crops up!