Issue 146 – August 14th 2018

Business

Bad Idea Rejection Tokens

I really like this idea from @jaredsinclair . In my experience one of the most important parts of leading a team is giving team members the room and support they need to develop and grow. As a engineering lead that is a balance though and means knowing when to veto things and when to give people the freedom to experiment and try new things. This is idea is one that Jared summarises very nicely in this article.

How to Build a Brand for Your Mobile App: Strategies, Tips and Examples

With an increasingly competitive App Store, the team at @tubikstudio provide some strategies for creating a strong mobile brand – essential for making your app stand out from the crowd.

Career

My Tech Interviews Experience: Failures, Successes and Tips for You

Fresh from interviewing with some of the biggest tech companies on the planet @BalestraPatrick imparts some tips and advice to help you on your own interview journey.

Sponsored Link

New Book: Server Side Swift with Vapor

If you’re a beginner to web development, but have worked with Swift for some time, you’ll find it’s easy to create robust, fully-featured web apps and web APIs with Vapor 3.

This book starts with the basics of web development and introduces the basics of Vapor; it then walks you through creating APIs and web backends; creating and configuring databases; deploying to Vapor Cloud; testing your creations and more!

Design

Building Fluid Interfaces

The ‘Designing Fluid Interfaces’ talk from this year’s WWDC was one of the most well received talks of this years conference showing you how to create fluid, gestural interfaces on the iPhone X. The problem though was that the pseudo code included within the talk left a lot to the imagination so in this article @nathangitter attempts to bridge the gap with a review and some concrete examples of the things that were covered. You can find the corresponding source code here .

medium.com

The Case for CloudKit

When it comes to backend services for mobile applications, there are a wide range of options. The dominant framework in the market is Google’s Firebase, but on iOS, CloudKit can, and often is, a great option. In this article, @andrewcbancroft puts forward the case of why you might want to look at using CloudKit over one of the other backend services.

Code

Refactoring Massive App Delegate

Massive View Controllers are a common problem in many iOS apps and over the years there have been a wide variety of articles showing you how to combat them. Your app delegate however can suffer similar symptoms and with this in mind @V8tr has a number of tips and patterns that you can use to keep the size of your app delegate to a minimum.

vadimbulavin.com

SpriteKit: Shaders and Geometry

A great article from @hmblebee on how to use SpriteKit’s SKShader and SKWarpGeometry to create some advanced visual effects in your SpriteKit apps and games.

Libraries

DifferenceKit

Wanting to find the differences between two Swift collections? DifferenceKit by @ra1028fe5 , is a fast, flexible, O(n) diffing framework for calculating the differences between two Swift collections.

github.com

SwiftEntryKit

Taking the pain out of pop-ups and notifications, SwiftEntryKit by Daniel Huri is Daniel Huri is a highly configurable banner library for easily displaying pop-ups and notification within your iOS applications.

Videos

Technical Debt Isn’t Technical

You’ll have no doubt come across the term ‘technical debt’ but is technical debt really technical? In this talk, @einarwh examines this concept and proposes the idea that we can’t solve the problem of technical debt with virtuous coding alone.

vimeo.com

Instruments Workshop

In this online workshop, @e_zwart shows you how to use Instruments to identify, and then fix, critical performance bottlenecks within your apps.

Other

Finding Local Destinations with Siri’s Regionally Specific Language Models for Speech Recognition

An interesting peek behind the scenes of some of the improvements that have been made to Siri’s recognition of local named entities such as business or other local points of interest through the use of geographically localized machine learning models. Nice idea.