Issue 179 – April 16th 2019

Business

Unsure If You Should Be Using Push Notifications In Your App? I’ve Cracked It.

Struggling to decide whether to include push notifications in your app? @tapadoo has a good litmus test to keep in mind. :joy: medium.com

How to Get Bugs Fixed by Apple

In a follow-up to an article from @nibroc that I linked to back in Issue 175, @macgreg has a new article with some useful tips on how to bring serious bugs to the attention of Apple and some of the things you can do to improve the chances that your bug gets fixed. codecookread.com

Swift

Swift 5 Frozen Enums

If’s funny how the blog posts in the community are often influenced by what we’re working on every day and with so many people starting to move their code to Swift 5, I guess it’s not surprising that this week, has seen a number of posts from different people on Swift 5’s changes to enums. One of the best of these was this one from @kharrison looking at both the new @unknown annotation as well as the concept of a frozen enums for your C and Objective-C code. useyourloaf.com

A Long Overdue Update on Swift 5.0 For Rasberry Pi Zero/1/2/3

Although Apple platforms obviously remain the largest target for Swift, that’s not to say progress isn’t being made on other platforms as well. Swift 5 for Linux is already available, windows looks to be shaping up well, and this week, @uraimo has also written an update on the progress for Swift 5 on a Raspberry Pi! Great work from everyone involved! uraimo.com

Code

Activity Classification for watchOS

In this three-part series ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ), @tchutch94 shows you how to leverage machine learning and on-device sensor data to classify different user activities on an Apple Watch. medium.com

Working with Create ML’s MLDataTable to Pre-Process Non-Image Data

A lot of the examples you’ll see around the community focus on using CreateML for it’s classification capabilities. I liked the fact that this article from @ozgr_shn takes a different approach and covers one CreateML’s less well known features – the ability to create machine learning models from tabular data. fritz.ai

Libraries

Smoke Framework 1

The Server-Side Swift community grew that little bit larger this week with @tachyonics announcing the release of Smoke Framework a new light-weight server-side Swift framework from Amazon that uses SwiftNIO for it’s networking layer, has built-in support for JSON-encoded request and response payloads and (I guess unsurprisingly) a number of clients for common AWS services. swift.org

nef

This week we also saw the release of Nef – a new framework from @tomasruizlopez and the team at @47deg . Nef is focused on closing the gap between your code and documentation, and consists of set of command line tools that lets you automatically generate your documentation from your example code and markdown docs written in a Swift Playground. Looks useful. 47deg.com

Testing

Stubbing in Pair with Swift Compiler: A Spy Registration

Level up your testing skills with this article from @norapsi showing you how to harness the Swift compiler to generate a spy for your Swift tests to observe and record the side-effects of your code. medium.com

Podcasts

Swift By Sundell – With Special Guests Chris Eidhof and Matt Gallagher

On this weeks issue of the Swift By Sundell podcast @chriseidhof , @cocoawithlove and @johnsundell debate the relative merits of different app architectures along with some tips on how to decide on what patterns, frameworks, and concepts to adopt when architecting and building an app. I enjoyed this one. swiftbysundell.com

Videos

Codemobile 2019

I’m glad I’ve got some time off in the next few weeks as the team at @codemobileuk have already released all the videos from this years conference. There’s some great talks in here covering everything from functional programming and server-side Swift to machine learning and auto layout. Have a look and see if any of the catch your eye. youtube.com