This Week in Swift

Swift Around the Web

JSONShootout: Compare several Swift JSON mappers.

Great look at three popular "JSON Parsing" libraries that actually deal with finding the best way to map JSON objects. This is that answer to the question "which Swift JSON Parsing library should I use?" Hint: it's not SwiftyJSON...

Thinking from Scratch with Sets in Swift

There are so many cases where Set can be used instead of Array, but I always default to Array out of habit. Thanks @marinbenc for the reminder and detailed explanation of when, why, and how to use sets.

Code

How to Do XCTestCase tearDown Wrong (and Right)

I never thought too much about how setUp and tearDown actually works. For example, I had no idea that XCTestCase never gets allocated or deallocated. Make sure to tearDown 😬

Getting Started With RxSwift and RxCocoa

Love the simple explanation of reactive programming:

"Most programming in the Object-Oriented era has been imperative like that: Your code tells your program what to do and has many ways to listen to changes—but you generally must actively tell the system when something changes.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but wouldn’t it be even better if you could set things up so that when something in your app changes, the code updates automatically? That’s the basic idea of reactive programming: your application can react to changes in the underlying data without you telling it to do so directly. This makes it easier to focus on the logic at hand rather than maintaining a particular state."

Apple News

Whole-Module Optimization in Swift 3

"Whole-module optimization is an optimization mode of the Swift compiler. The performance win of whole-module optimization heavily depends on the project, but it can be up to two or even five times."

Objective-C id as Swift Any

👏👏👏

"In Swift 3, the id type in Objective-C now maps to the Any type in Swift, which describes a value of any type, whether a class, enum, struct, or any other Swift type. This change makes Objective-C APIs more flexible in Swift, because Swift-defined value types can be passed to Objective-C APIs and extracted as Swift types, eliminating the need for manual “box” types. These benefits also extend to collections: Objective-C collection types NSArray, NSDictionary, and NSSet, which previously only accepted elements of AnyObject, now can hold elements of Any type. For hashed containers, such as Dictionary and Set, there’s a new type AnyHashable that can hold a value of any type conforming to the Swift Hashable protocol."

Random Cool Stuff

The secret behind Italy’s rarest pasta

Who wants to quit everything right now and go learn how to make this 🍝?!!! Well, it's at least added to my foodie bucket list... Thanks @timshim for sharing this with me!

In Case You Missed It

Build Features, Not Apps - iOS Conf SG 2016

My talk from @iOSConfSG is out - slides here. This talk is a bit different from ones I usually do, but it's something I've been thinking a lot about over the past few months. Specifically, the future of the iOS ecosystem and where apps fit in. Build Features, Not Apps!

And while you're there, also check out @inamiy's talk on taking the lessons from JavaScript and applying them to Swift to build a Reactive State Machine 😂😂😂 And of course, here are all the other great talks.

Videos

Driving User Engagement with watchOS 3

I love this talk because it focuses on making your app usable without the user ever going into their physical iPhone App. This is something I discuss as the future of iOS development in my talk at iOSConfSG - I don't mention the Apple Watch in such detail, but it is definitely a huge piece of the new iOS ecosystem as it is the personal on-the-go device.

Result Oriented Development

"Result is actually the Optional type with more power" - love this! Must watch talk to power up your Swift code 💪

Swift Evolution

private & fileprivate

Whoa! Apparently there's a mailing list discussion on reversing the fileprivate vs private access level decision in Swift 3.0. I think the distinction is definitely confusing, so agree that the minor convenience it brings is not worth the confusion / complexity.

Swift Code

Macaw - Powerful and easy-to-use vector graphics Swift library with SVG support
Each - Elegant ⏱ interface for Swift apps
FormValidatorSwift - The FormValidatorSwift framework allows you to validate inputs of text fields and text views in a convenient way. It has been developed and used by iOS developers at ustwo.
MMCardView - Custom CollectionView like Wallet App
DateTimePicker - A nicer iOS UI component for picking date and time

Learning

Paying Down Technical Knowledge Debt

My favorite and least favorite thing about being a software engineer is that there are an infinite amount of things to learn. I would get bored out of my mind if I didn't have a job where I was challenged this much (I've had a few jobs like that before my career switch 😱), but it can definitely get overwhelming feeling like I don't know so much most of the time.

Great article by @modocache on striking the balance between ignoring things you don't know and shipping vs taking the time to learn. There really isn't an answer to this. I personally just try to follow whatever I'm most excited about at the moment, all while knowing that I will never know everything and being ok with that.

Other Platforms

"As of about 5 minutes ago, @CocoaPods works on Linux"

Whoa!!! Great work @segiddins 👏👏👏

Swift on Linux

Thanks @ashfurrow for documenting the beginners steps on getting Swift running on Linux. Saves a lot of time for those of us in iOS 🙋🏻 who are interested in experimenting but have no idea where to get started.

Swift Thoughts

Swift can speak! Ok, so this might not be the most useful ATM, but it's sooooo cool! Source code here.

Hope you get to build something amazing this week 🙌

This Week in Swift October 24th 2016

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