Issue 182 – May 7th 2019

Design

Designing for Different States in the UI

I enjoyed this article from @elwexicano . It’s a good reminder that when designing apps, you shouldn’t focus solely on designing for those happy-day states where your app is fully populated but also for the alternative states such as when the app has no data, data is loading, or something has gone wrong. Worth thinking about. uxdesign.cc

Swift

Better Swift Codable Models Through Composition

@IanKay shows you how to use generics, phantom types, codable and wrappers to add additional type-safety to your JSON-based APIs. medium.com

Code

NSSecureCoding

You’ll probably be familiar with using Foundation’s NSCoding protocol for the encoding and decoding of structured data. @jordanmorgan10 takes this one step further with a look at it’s less well-known sibling NSSecureCoding and how you can use it to encode and decode data in a more secure fashion. The good news is that it takes very little work to switch over. swiftjectivec.com

Speed Up your iOS Development: Demystifying Complex UIViews using Decorators

@fjtrujy shows you how to separate your view configuration from your views themselves through the use of View Decorators a great way to simplify your views, increasing their reusability and reducing the overall amount of code you need to write. medium.com

Building a Simple Lane Detection iOS app using OpenCV

Interesting project from @anuragajwani showing you how to integrate OpenCV into your iOS app to create a simple lane detector. Now, if only we can get the steering sorted… . medium.com

Tools

Continuous Integration With GitHub, Fastlane & Jenkins

If you’ve not added a continuous integration system to your development workflow you really should – it’s an absolute game changer for ensuring that your app behaves as expected and for ensuring nasty bugs don’t creep in in future. In this article, @mataharimau shows you how to setup a system of your own, integrating GitHub, Fastlane and Jenkins (or Travis CI – she covers both) to automatically build and test your code on check in. raywenderlich.com

Libraries

InAppViewDebugger

If you’re a fan of Reveal or Apple’s own View Debugger then you’ll love this new project from @indragie which brings on-device, 3D view debugging to your apps. Looks great. github.com

RxSwift 5.0

The ever popular RxSwift has reached version 5.0 this week and whilst mostly backwards compatible this new release also includes a bunch of new improvements including the break out of Relays into a new framework RxRelay. To mark the occasion @freak4pc had posted a new article running through all the changes. medium.com

Videos

App Builders 2019

For any spare moments you’ve got this week, then look no further than this great set of talks from this years App Builders conference. As last year, there’s a wide range of talks from some great speakers so definitely worth checking out. youtube.com

What I Wish I Knew About Image Literals…. Filtering!

I learnt something this week. A short, but useful, tip from @buildthatapp on how using Xcode’s media selector to speed up the selection of your image literals. Why is it after all these years I never knew this existed? youtube.com

Other

Technical Writing on the Web

Hunting for links for Swift Developments I read my fair share of technical blogs. They’re a great way to share what you’re working on, learn new things and generally get involved in the community. If you’re looking to start a blog of your own, @ashfurrow has published an article with some great tips on how to write technical articles for the web. You never know, it might even lead to a future appearance in Swift Developments as well! ashfurrow.com