This Week in Swift

Swift Thoughts

Last week, I attended a Creative Mornings Talk by Ash Huang. Since we're all learning Swift, this slide stood out to me: "Never put yourself in a position where you'll be treated as foolish for learning".

Apple Love

TestFlight Beta Testing

Upon acquisition by Apple early this year, the first order of business for TestFlight was to shut down Android support. Now, TestFlight has officially been integrated into the Apple eco-system. As a developer, you can now invite up to 1,000 beta testers using just their email address - no need to keep track of UDIDs or provisioning profiles!

Apple Pay Human Interface Guidelines

Love the screenshot in here of how Apple Pay works!

iOS Human Interface Guidelines: Designing for iOS

The iOS Human Interface Guidelines have officially been updated for iOS8. I don't have the official diff, but check out the Adaptivity and Layout section as a start to read about the new iOS8 Size Classes!

Swift Around the Web

Which function does Swift call? Part 1: Return Values

@AirspeedVelocity points out that in Swift, you can have two functions with the same name, but a different return type. So which function gets called? The result will shock you! Really, this is an incredible article, so take a look and find out for yourself :) And of course there is a must-see sequel - Which function does Swift call? Part 2: Single Arguments.

Swift and the curious case of AnyObject

If you've tried out Swift at all, you've probably seen the compiler warning about AnyObject. Well, the warnings go away sometimes when Foundation is imported or if your Swift class is marked for usage with Objective-C. @ColinEberhardt points out the issues with AnyObject which make your code a lot less safe.

Functional Swift and Memoization

@ColinEberhardt shows how memoization can be used to cache the return value of a function in order to improve performance. For those of you who secretly have no idea what memoization is - "memoization is an optimisation technique where the return values of a function are cached to avoid repeating the same computation."

Swift Property Observers

Swift Property Observers are similar to KVO in Objective-C. @CodingExplorer explores swift property observers in more detail.

Adding forEach() to Swift Arrays

@nicemohawk shows a very small and simple use-case for Generics. He writes: "Being able to make this kind of simple extension to a low level type and having it just work makes me a little more open to the idea of Generics invading our little corner of the software development world."

Polymorphism in Swift (Xcode 6.0.1)

"The word polymorphism is not to be found anywhere in a search of Apple's two iBooks about the Swift language (and its use with Objective-C). But don't take this to mean that polymorphism is absent from Swift."

#iOSdev

Designing for iPhone6 with Storyboard Constraints

If you're not on board with AutoLayout yet, go ahead and "download Xcode 6, get yourself a drink, set aside an hour" to go through this in-depth tutorial by @mathewsanders. And even if you do think you know AutoLayout, skim through this article - you will for sure find some advanced designed-based techniques you probably don't use yet!

iOS8 Sampler

@shu223 open-sourced an incredible overview of iOS 8... in code! Just download the source-code and run the app to get a sample of everything from SceneKit to HealthKit to Image Filters and a lot more!

iOS 8 Photo Extension in Swift

@darrarski created an iOS 8 Photo Editing Extension in Swift that adds mustaches to your face. What can go wrong with that?

iOS 8: Integrating Touch ID

The most valuable piece of this Touch ID tutorial is the part about considerations when / if using Touch ID for authentication!

Podcasts

Conrad Stoll On What's New In Core Data

I haven't had a chance to listen to this one yet, but it's definitely on my list, so including it here!

Swift Code

BWWalkthrough

BWWalkthrough is a class to build custom walkthroughs for your iOS App

Quick

A behavior-driven development test framework for Swift and Objective-C.

Ken Burns

Ken burns effect is an animated zoom effect used in video production from still imagery. You can view the source code on Github here.

FloatRatingView

Whole, half or floating point ratings control written in Swift

Haneke/HanekeSwift

A lightweight generic cache for iOS written in Swift with extra love for images.

SugarRecord

CoreData management library written in Swift

swift-json

Even Swiftier JSON Handler

Tutorials

Swift Functional Programming Tutorial

I love this well-written and easy-to-understand Functional Programming tutorial by @ColinEberhardt.

Slide In Animation in Swift

@andrewcbancroft walks through building a simple slide animation in Swift.

Videos

Facebook's iOS Infrastructure - @Scale 2014 Mobile

Adam Ernst and Ari Grant gave a presentation at @Scale 2014 about why Facebook switched away from Core Data and MVC to immutable models and their own layout engine that separates the layout from the process of creating the view hierarchy from recycled immutable views. This is a MUST SEE video!