This Week in Swift

Swift Thoughts

This week, I'm finally super excited about augmented reality. It seems more of an impending reality than the stuff of science fiction movies. Read some of the links below to find out why!

Apple Love

Swift Source Compatibility

Wow! You can now submit your open source project to be part of a source compatibility test suite for Swift! This will help the Swift compiler developers understand the compatibility impact their changes have on real-world Swift projects.

Over 30 projects have already joined, and the first regression has already been found and fixed 🙌 Check if your project qualifies!

Swift Around the Web

Swift range containment operator

I always forget about the ~= operator, but this is a great post about its use and how you can extend it to be even nicer! I didn't agree with the author reading through this until I saw the if example at the end. Makes so much sense!

What in the World is an “Escaping Closure” in Swift?

I'll be honest - I still get confused by the concept of an escaping vs non-escaping closer. And the default got switched from @escaping to @non-escaping (now deprecated) in Swift 3...

Love the simple examples for when a closure is @escaping in this article!

Swift Evolution

Multi-Line String Literals

Great Swift feature for Swift 4:

let poemByHansChristianAnderson = """
                To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
                To gain all while you give,
                To roam the roads of lands remote,
                To travel is to live.
                """

Help with implementing SE-0155 and SE-0169

📣 The Swift team needs your help! These two proposals have been accepted, but the Swift team doesn't have the capacity to implement them in time for Swift 4.

Can you help?

WATCH

Using the crown to control a slider (and label) in WatchOS3

Super useful tutorial. This is a bit harder than it should be 😬

#iOSdev

Swift Protocols with Default Implementations as UI Mixins

Clever use of required UIKit variables such as a UITableView and UIRefreshControl in a protocol!

Time traveling in Swift unit tests

Fast & predictable date-dependent tests, without having to invent a lot of infrastructure or resort to hacky solutions like swizzling the system date 😍

Swift Code

TestDrive - Quickly try out any Swift pod or framework in a playground
BouncyLayout - A collection view layout that makes your cells bounce.
UIFontComplete - Make working with UIFont faster and less error-prone.
Sumo - Sumo is a library that prepares for fast upload for iOS. It is effective when uploading by selecting images continuously.
FlexiblePageControl - A flexible PageControl like Instagram.
Fire-in-Swift - A delightful HTTP/HTTPS networking framework for iOS/macOS/watchOS/tvOS platforms written in Swift.

Videos

Writing Your UI Swiftly

A really clear talk that shows how to harness the power of Swift in your UI code and explains Swift's most powerful concepts at the same time. I really loved the last part about repeatedly managing different data loading states in your ViewControllers!

Everything a Swift Dev Ever Wanted to Know About Machine Learning

Machine Learning is already starting to creep into everything and it's only a matter of time before we start using it as Swift developers. Get the simple explanation of what machine learning is, the opportunities involved, and how to start learning and integrating it into your projects 🤖

Business

Facebook launches augmented reality Camera Effects developer platform

While SnapChat has kept their camera filters tech secret, Facebook has unleashed impressive tools to make it super easy for developers to create their own filters on the Facebook camera. Check out this video for how easy it is! Oh yeah, and it's built with Swift!

But the most interesting part of this article is the way Facebook is thinking about augmented reality (AR) as the future. They're starting with the tools and the phone camera, but the vision is pretty impressive and actually something that is super easy to imagine and normal. Before, I thought of AR as associated a lot closer to playing games on the oculus rift - something that made me dizzy and I could not relate to. But now the future is clear! 👋 AR!

Apologize, simple suggestion, how to get in touch for more help.

@iKenndac had great results from responding to app reviews. Two ★☆☆☆☆ reviews turned into a ★★★★☆ review and a ★★★★★ review! Read his response to get an idea of how to best respond to your own app's bad reviews...

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👋 AR! May 1st 2017