Issue 148 – August 28th 2018

User testing can be a particularly valuable activity when you’re looking for insights into how your users will use your app, but what if you don’t have an enormous budget to conduct a full-on usability study? @UserLookco outline three methods you can employ instead that won’t break the bank.

Estimating software projects is notoriously difficult but with the increased use of machine learning the difficulty of this task kicks up another notch. With this in mind, Bartek Ciszewski provides some tips and advice to keep in mind when faced with the challenge of estimating machine learning projects of your own.

For some time now there has been unofficial support for using Swift within Docker containers through the Swift Docker project. This week though, there has been a move to bring official Docker support into the Swift.org project. Good news, especially for Swift on the server and the wider Swift community.

Often you’ll see the same sets of data items appear together in multiple places within your code making them an ideal candidates for refactoring. In this article @khanlou provides some more tips on how to identify these commonly used groups of data.

One area of ARKit improvement this year was Face Tracking. In this tutorial from @yonomitt you’ll learn how to use track a users face, overlay an emoji and then manipulate that emoji based on the users facial expressions. Selfie anyone?

Save yourself some time and effort with these tips from @Gabriel__Lewis on how to improve your workflow within Xcode.

If you’ve done any sort of error handling in Swift, you’ll know that it’s set up to short-circuit on the first failure it encounters – not ideal if you’re handling things like form data, where multiple inputs may result in multiple errors. This library from @mbrandonw and @stephencelis attempts to address this by defining a Validated type – a Result-like type that can accumulate multiple errors.

I’ve no idea how @johnsundell finds the time to put out all this great stuff but if you’re writing any sort of blog or social media posts involving Swift, his new flexible and lightweight syntax highlighter Splash is worth checking out.

NSPredicate is one of those classes that hides a lot of complexity under the hood. This new one-page site from @soulchildpls provides a great reference. One to keep tucked away for when you need it.

Dmitrii Ivanov imparts some of the knowledge he and the iOS team at Quardio have gained over several years of using Core Data in practice including a review of a number of different Core data stacks and the performance implications of each.

If, like me, you weren’t lucky enough to attend this years AltConf event, a number of talks from this years conference have now been published. Some great talks to add to your playlist.

Great piece of digital archeology from @ismh chronicaling the changes in Apple’s Aqua interface over the last 18 years.