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The 2016 Guide to Requirements for Mobile Applications
Friends don't let friends write bad requirements— especially with our easy-to-use, comprehensive template for writing mobile app requirements.
Swift Around the Web
10 thousand times faster Swift
Learn how @iceX33 optimized his FlatBuffersSwift library from taking 6 seconds to 0.00035 seconds to decode a small object graph. That is 70x swifter than in C 😱
"Now this kind of benchmark might feel artificial for App developers, but for a BackEnd developer it is actually a decent use case. Being able to decode thousands of small payloads is something that a server should be able to do very efficiently. And as the dream of Swift on the server is in the air, this is actually quite interesting topic."
Swift Compilation Reporting at Tumblr
Great idea for all teams! Tumblr shares their Swift CPR script to automate monitoring compilation performance.
"From these insights, we have been able to refactor functions that took over 10 seconds to compile to roughly a tenth of a second."
Code
CocoaPods 1.0 Migration Guide
CocoaPods is officially at 1.0 🎉 Congratulations and a big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed in making such an invaluable tool for the community.
Beware the UIKit Visitors!
😬
"We like our custom tint color; but not enough to justify such an impact on performance. By deactivating the custom tint color we bring the overall run time of
viewDidAppearfrom our example project from over 700ms down to ~10ms."
Apple News
Apple & SAP Partner to Revolutionize Work
First IBM, now SAP. And, you guessed it! There will be Swift 🐥
"As a part of the partnership, SAP will develop native iOS apps for critical business operations. These apps for iPhone and iPad will be built with Swift™"
There will also be a new iOS SDK and developer training academy, which I'm guessing will be Swift-first as well.
Random Cool Stuff
In Case You Missed It
Slides from my Practical Protocol-Oriented-Programming (POP💥) talk are up! And here are the detailed write-ups:
Enjoy!
Videos
Unpacking JSON with Swift
I'm usually skeptical of "yet another JSON Parsing library in Swift", but this is super elegant & Swifty (yay Protocols vs subclassing!) to implement. I will use Unbox & Wrap in the my next Swift project! Thx @johnsundell 🙌
Introduction to Swift Intermediate Language
Easy-to-follow talk that answers the following questions for those who are curious about Swift under the hood:
- What makes Swift fast?
- How does Swift work?
Swift Evolution
[SE-0066] ACCEPTED: Standardize function type argument syntax to require parentheses
This:
Int -> Float
String -> Int
T -> U
Int -> Float -> String
Will now have to be written with parenthesis like this:
(Int) -> Float
(String) -> Int
(T) -> U
(Int) -> (Float) -> String
This is set for Swift 3.0, but of course this is an easy change / habit to get into before then so you'll have less refactoring to do later!
Books
Refactoring To Patterns
I spoke and attended several conferences last month, and this book was mentioned and referenced over and over again. Putting it on here as a reminder for me to read it and for those who are interested in learning how to write better code.
Note: this is an affiliate link
Swift Code
- nsdateformatter.com - Source code for nsdateformatter.com. Built with Swift using Frank & Stencil. Hosted on Linux.
- SwiftTweaks - Tweak your iOS app without recompiling! Blog post here.
- Fusuma - Instagram-like photo browser and a camera feature with a few line of code in Swift.
- Marklight - Markdown syntax highlighter for iOS
- Ramotion - PaperOnboarding is a material design slider
- Sentiments - Sentiments is an iOS app written in Swift that analyzes text for positive or negative sentiment.
Business
The New 10-Year Vesting Schedule
As someone who is not educated in how the startup stock options work, this is seriously eye-opening. I've never worked anywhere for 4 years (10 years is out of the question!), so this really wouldn't work for me. Always ask for more $$$ vs stock up front! Or don't work in startups of course.
Swift Thoughts
So I tried Gboard, Google's new iOS-first keyboard that includes Glide Typing and emoji searching, and actually liked it! That is, until I needed to change the curser position on a tweet I was so masterfully composing...
I tried to force-touch as I do on the Apple Keyboard to move the curser, but nothing happened. I was so frustrated by this, I had no other choice but to tweet about it! Luckily, some nice people on Twitter pointed out that I could actually swipe from right to left on Gboard's space bar to do this and it works well enough (no vertical or selection functionality though).
The point is that as we add these secret force-touch or swiping gesture to apps, they become super hard to discover. However, one thing I heard from someone is that teens like the secret gestures because it makes them cool to know them - that's one of the reasons Snapchat is so popular among teens.
All I know is that I wouldn't have discovered Gboard's spacebar gesture without someone explicitly telling me about it, but I wouldn't want a tutorial about it either. Maybe word of mouth about these features is not the worst thing 🤔