Issue 169 – February 5th 2019

News

Apple’s Banning Spree

So unless you’ve been sleeping all week, you’ll have no doubt have heard about the uproar around Apple disabling the enterprise distribution certificates of both Facebook and Google. Whilst it looks like Apple is working with Facebook and Google to get things resolved it’s good to see that Apple are applying the rules equally to both indie developers and large corporations alike. @tomwarren has a good round-up of what’s been going on.

theverge.com

Business

How Great Product Managers Deal with Technical Debt

Technical debt is one of those things that slowly creeps up on you. A workaround here. A TODO there. And soon you find yourself with a maintenance problem you didn’t know you had. So given that technical debt is so prevelant, how *should* we deal with it? @jacknotjohn has some thoughts.

productcoalition.com

Design

Design Tips: How to Make Your App Icon Stand Out

Whether you like it or not, your app icon is main storefront for your app. It’s the first thing people see in the App Store and plays a big part in communicating what your app is all about but with 1000’s of apps entering the store every day, what can you do to make your icon stand out? @tubikstudio has written a useful guide with some beautiful examples.

uxplanet.org

Swift

Let’s Stop Filtering for a Second

Some great advice from @tjeerdintveen . With Swift continuing to develop and new features being added to the language on a regular basis, take a moment to expand your Swift knowledge and see whether there is a method out there that’s a better fit for your needs than the methods you know and love.

swiftindepth.com

Sponsored Links

iOS Con 2019

Do you want to find out all the most popular iOS & Swift technologies and discover the latest ideas and best practices? iOSCon 2019 celebrates the latest development and sharpest minds in iOS & Swift. Come and meet the community on 21st – 22nd March in London, organised by Swift Developments media partner @skillsmatter !

skillsmatter.com

Skafos.ai is Machine Learning for iOS Developers

Skafos is the tool for iOS developers to deploy machine learning to their app. Get started with a pre-trained model, drop in the SDK and then updates are pushed to your app in the background. Sign up for the free beta today.

skafos.ai

Code

Adding the Finishing Touches to 3D Models in Xcode

In this post, @bashachris shows you how to enhance the realism to your 3D models by adding lighting, shadows and reflection to your ARKit scenes. I’d also encourage you to read the rest of the series as it’s a good introduction to working with ARKit in general.

novoda.com

Creating DSL in Swift

@mecid goes meta in this quick article showing you how to simplify your UIView code by creating a Domain Specific Language (DSL) using Swift. Trailing closures for the win.

github.io

Integrating Apple Pay Into Your App

With Apple Pay becoming increasingly ubuquitous (at least here in the UK), Pranav Wadhwa has written great introductory tutorial showing you how to integrated it into your own iOS apps.

medium.com

Avoiding Race Conditions in Swift

If your going to get the very best performance out of your apps, you’re inevitably going to use some form of concurrency and that in turn leads to the issue of managing access to shared resources. It can be a tricky problem and one that you can easily get wrong so what options do we actually have on iOS? @mmabdellateef has been taking a look.

medium.com

ML Kit Tutorial for iOS: Recognizing Text in Images

Core ML burst onto the scene at WWDC in 2017, making machine learning far more accessible. Google haven’t been sitting on their laurels though, and have introduced their own machine learning framework for mobile devices – ML Kit. In this article, @_davideast shows you how to get started – with a tutorial on using ML Kit to recognize text in a set of images.

raywenderlich.com

Testing

Faster App Setup For Unit Tests

A quick tip from @kharrison but one that is no less useful – espescially if you have a large suite of tests running in a CI system. General principle: Doing less means faster startup. :+1:

useyourloaf.com

Tools

Debugging Tips and Tricks

Although we do our best to avoid introducing bugs into our apps, they invevitably creep in. @dagostin has put together some tips and tricks to help with those hours of hair pulling.

agostini.tech

Other

The Chart That Lies

Really enjoyed this one. @jordanmorgan10 imparts some wise words on those side projects we undertake and the effort we apply to them. With three growing kids of my own, I can relate.

swiftjectivec.com