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Migrate Your App To Swift—Mobile Makers
5-day class for iOS developers: Migrate your own Obj-C app to Swift, and explore new iOS 8 features. First class led by Homebrew pro developer Max Howell.
RWDevCon 2015: The Tutorial Conference
RWDevCon is a conference focused on high quality programming tutorials. It’s in Washington DC in February 2015, brought to you by the teams at raywenderlich.com and 360iDev.
Swift Around the Web
10 Swift IOS open-source projects you cannot ignore
This is a great list of not-to-be-missed Swift open-source projects! I looked into the source code for Alamofire yesterday and learned a lot just by looking at the code (enums FTW!). I've also been using Quick for unit testing my code - it makes test code look really nice. I'm excited to try out more of the ones in this list!
Random Pi
"tl;dr I’m going to show you a little trick that uses random numbers to approximate the value of Pi."...
Function Composition
@objcio started a new newsletter - "injecting small weekly doses of functional Swift code in your inbox". I'm really really excited about the small functional snippets, since I don't have as much time to learn all of functional programming at once just yet! It's free, so definitely sign up!
Filtering Arrays Containing Multiple Data Types in Swift – rshelby.com
I think we can now officially skip using NSPredicate for filtering arrays! Love these beautiful examples from @ryanashelby.
Code
8 Patterns to Help You Destroy Massive View Controller
Yes, MVC stands for Massive View Controller in iOS! This article goes into a great overview of architecture patterns you should consider for your own code. I've been focused on doing Test-Driven-Development for the past few weeks, and one thing I've definitely learned is that the correct patterns end up emerging as you write your tests first. So while these are great patterns, make sure they emerge naturally as you write your code. It's definitely good to keep them in mind though!
I Want to Write iOS Apps. Where Do I Start?
If you're new to iOS development, check out this LifeHacker article with resources for getting started. For additional resources, check out an article I wrote BS (Before Swift), which still largely applies - A Comprehensive List Of Resources For Aspiring iOS Developers.
Fundamentals of Image Processing in Metal
Last week, Apple released a video tutorial of how to make your first iOS App on their Swift Blog - building an image filtering app. Here is a more advanced tutorial - how to do the same with the new Metal framework!
Apple News
It’s been way too long.
Happy another "secret" Apple announcement day! #ItsBeenWayTooLong
In case the suspense is killing you, the new iPad specs have been leaked... More rumors here. Enjoy!
Design
How iOS 8 Will Change App Design
This is a very quick (5 minutes) but very informative overview of designing for the big - iPhone 6+ and iPhone 6 - and the small - two Apple Watch sizes. Key takeaway - test your app on the device to see if it actually feels right in real life.
Random Cool Stuff
Introduction to Functional Programming
EdX is offering a FREE Introduction to Functional Programming course starting right now! The course is in Haskell, but my guess is that the concepts can easily translate to Swift.
Tutorials
iOS 8 Handoff Tutorial
Handoff is one of the most exciting features of iOS 8 in my opinion. I'm always emailing myself links so I can look at them on my computer or iPad. Of course, as a developer, I haven't gotten to actually implement it in my apps, especially with learning Swift and making the apps iOS 8 compatible as a bigger priority for now...
Videos
Abizer Nasir Thinking in Swift
FizzBuzz taken to the EXTREME in Swift wherein Abizer implements a FizzBuzzable protocol.
iOS 8 Demo: Asynchronous Testing With Xcode 6
I tried out Asynchronous Testing last week, and it worked! It's not as clean-cut as I'd like (wish there was some kind of completion block instead of expectations), but it's there and it works. Here is a demo.
Swift Code
swift-style-guide - Style guide & coding conventions for Swift projects
Alamofire-SwiftyJSON - Alamofire extension for serialize NSData to SwiftyJSON
Typhoon-Swift-Example - Swift example application for Typhoon (Weather)
SQLite.swift - A pure Swift framework wrapping SQLite3. Small. Simple. Safe.
MapManager - Map manager is a MapKit wrapper in Swift to provide route direction drawing
Swift Thoughts
LinkedIn's SlideShare has officially released their first-ever iOS app - built in Swift and designed for iOS 8 from the start! The app also takes advantage of iOS 8’s Notification Center, which displays two slideshows a day in widget form based on a users’ interests according to an interview with the devs from ReadWriteWeb.
There are probably more iOS 8 / Swift apps out in the app store, so let me know what they are. I'm excited to see one from a big company to use as an example, especially since we now get to see such a widely-used Swift app in the wild! I've been playing with it a bit, and it works great.