Issue 153 – October 2nd 2018

News

Public Betas with TestFlight

Some great news this week with Apple rolling out a new feature in TestFlight that lets developers invite testers via a public URL. It gives you all the features you would expect like the ability to limit the number of signups and the ability to disable the public link at any time and overall looks like a great step forwards. 9to5mac.com

Business

8 Great Ideas for Better Mobile Marketing

Looking to beef up your app marketing? @rankingbyseo provides 8 tips on how to use pre and post launch to raise awareness and interest in your app launch. mention.com

Swift

Swift 5 Release Process

With Swift 4.2 out of the door, the Swift.org team have been turning their attention to Swift 5. This week, they’ve published details and an estimated schedule for the release along with details of the main motivations and goals for the release. swift.org

How Mirror Works

A great article on the Swift.org blog this week from @mikeash in which he looks at how the Swift runtime’s Mirror API works. I really enjoy these types of article and find that they are a great way to get acquainted with the interals of the Swift language. More please! :wink: swift.org

Code

Why #if DEBUG Conditional Should Be Avoided in Library Code

@arekholko with a better way for handling your if DEBUG blocks in your library code. It seems so obvious no he’s pointed it out! holko.pl

UIFieldBehaviour

You’ll most likely be familiar with the picture-in-picture functional of FaceTime calls where the picture gravitates toward one corner of the screen but do you know how it’s implemented? @jordanmorgan10 takes a look at UIKit’s UIFieldBehaviour class, the class that’s providing the magic behind the scenes. nshipster.com

Building the Enigma Machine in Swift

History and app development combine in this interesting article and side project from @dagostin in which he re-creates the famous second world war cipher machine in Swift. agostini.tech

Protocol-Oriented Themes for iOS Apps

It’s fair to say that Apple’s UIAppearance APIs aren’t always the most flexible way of implementing different themes for your app but with a little perseverance and with the power of Swift protocols you can construct something that does provide the structure and flexibility that you need. @basememara shows you how. basememara.com

Testing

Async/Await in Swift Unit Tests

@johnsundell continues his weekly series with some useful tips on how to clean up your asynchronous unit tests by implementing your own simple async / await approach. Hopefully some day Swift will have this natively but until then, John has you covered. swiftbysundell.com

Podcasts

Passion Projects

Great episode from @marcoarment and @Davidsmith on the importance of making room for side projects as a way of exploring, learning and growing your development skills and experience. relay.fm

Videos

NSSpain

I know I linked to this last week but since then, the team at NSSpain have release a bunch of new videos from this years conference with some great talks from the likes of @dimsumthinking , @stephencelis , @allonsykraken , @krstnfx , @davedelong and more. Definitely worth a look (or even a second look :wink:) if you haven’t already. vimeo.com

Other

PhotoKit’s Data Model

I wasn’t sure what to make of this tweet from @olebegemann this week except ‘wow’. I’d never have thought that it was that complicated! The Find My Friends data model (courtesy of @_inside ) doesn’t look any simpler either! oleb.net

Finally

Rejected

I have to say, I did have a bit of sympathy with @gknauss in this. Probably not the best way to ingraciate yourself with Apple and the App Store review team but it does highlight the need for some sort of common sense as part of the App Store review process. eod.com