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 Press Coverage For Your App
Gaining press attention for your app launch can play a major part in propelling your app toward app-store success. However, receiving this type of press attention doesn’t happen by magic and require that you work with the press and learn how to pitch your app in the right way. @dancounsell provides some great advice on how to best approach this.
dancounsell.com
iOS 11.2 Will Let Developers Offer Introductory Pricing for Subscription Apps
An interesting development this week with @apollozac reporting that iOS 11.2 will provide enhanced options for subscription-based apps allowing developers to offer special introductory pricing for new customers. On the face of it, it may be a good way for developers to reach more users than they may otherwise have been able to whilst still being able to earn some revenue along the way. It’ll be interesting to see what effect this has on the economics of subscription apps within the store.
9to5mac.com
Design
Good Sketches Will Help You Think Clearly
As one of those people who tend to think in pictures, I find that sketching, whether on paper or on a whiteboard, hugely beneficial when I’m trying to work out the design for a new app. With that said, I learnt some useful lessons from this article by Ishara sunjeewa and I’ll be trying to keep them in mind for my next design task.
prototypr.io
Swift
Swift’s Numeric Protocol
With the arrival of protocol-oriented Integers in Swift 4, @gregheo has been digging into the Swift source code and provides a nice run-down of how all the new protocols fit together.
swiftunboxed.com
Optimizing Swift Build Times
Although things have improved, compile times remain a big issue for large Swift projects due to the overhead of Swift’s compile-time type checker. However, there are things you can do to help alleviate this situation @arekholko provides a nice round-up of some of the techniques that you can employ.
github.com
Code
View-State Driven Applications
Back in Issue #108 I linked to @cocoawithlove‘s talk from try! Swift NYC 2017 in which he discussed the benefits of taking a view-state driven approach to your application architecture. As a follow-up, Matt has posted a much more in-depth article on the same topic looking at how to switch from a presentation-driven to to state-driven approach to app design. It’s a great article and one I’d thoroughly recommend taking a bit of time to read.
cocoawithlove.com
Mac
Learn macOS Development: Develop a Music App with Audio Playback and File Upload Features
If you’ve looking to expand your development skills beyond the iOS ecosystem into macOS development, @lawgarithmns has written a nice tutorial on how to develop a simple macOS music app that integrates AudioPlayer an open source wrapper around AVPlayer.
appcoda.com
Testing
How to Use Chaos In Your iOS Tests
With apps often being used by large numbers of users in ways that may never have been imagined, @olbrich_jan dives into the world of ‘chaos engineering’ – the idea of introducing some randomness into your testing – by taking a detailed look at SwiftCheck an open-source tool specifically designed to support this type of testing.
medium.com
Libraries
Mandoline
Mandoline is a Swift library from the team at Blue Apron that works with your View controller to provide a smooth scrolling ‘picking’ interface for your app.
github.com
SkeletonView
With almost every app performing some sort of asynchronous network access to retrieve data, the need for ‘loading’ views is stronger than ever. This is where SkeletonView from @juanpecatalan which provides a useful way to display place holder views whilst content is loading.
github.com
Videos
Building a Framework with VIPER
With app architecture being discussed heavily in recent weeks @Sdhingra89 looks at VIPER – what it is, why you should use it and how to apply it to your application framework. It’s a great introduction and as an added bonus there’s also an accompanying blog post as well!
realm.io
Other
Mistakes New Developers Make
This article from @cwagdev is for new and seasoned developers alike. If you’re a new developer it provides some great advice to keep in mind as you start your development journey and if your a seasoned developer it’s a great reminder to take it easy on newcomers and provide as much support as you can. A good read on both counts.
martiancraft.com