Issue 192 – July 30th 2019

@zntfdr provides a deep dive into the new diffing capabilities introduced into Swift 5.1. If you haven’t done so already I’d put this one on your list reading list as it has the potential to save you a lot of debugging effort down the line.

Apple’s NaturalLanguage framework debuted at last years WWDC and wraps up some powerful machine learning capabilities for analyzing and understanding text content. This new tutorial from @sai_k1065 walks you through some of the new features added at this years WWDC.

It’s a common problem with all new frameworks – there’s nice introductory material but not so much when you start digging into the detail. As it turns out, Apple’s new Sign in with Apple feature is at this point and with many developers are rushing to add this features to their apps over the summer @parrots has been kind enough to discuss some of the things he has learnt and trade-offs he’s decided to make.

A new addition to iOS 13 this year was the new BackgroundTasks framework – a new framework for executing long-running tasks in the background and for periodically refreshing your app data in the background. @mecid has been taking a look at some of the details.

Dive into the world of computational photography with this really interesting tutorial from @yonomitt that shows you how to use Apple’s Vision, CoreImage and Metal frameworks to stack multiple photos together to automagically remove elements from the image. I enjoyed this one.

Over time, it’s not unusual for cruft to build up within your project. With features regularly getting refactored, redesigned or removed @twannl shows you how to clean up those unused image assets with the help of some of the most popular open-source tools.

Improve your real-world testing skills with this article from @VojtaStavik which introduces `Behavior` – one of the hidden gems of the Quick testing framework that lets you leverage it’s generic behavior to easily write re-usable test specifications.

The only downside of having a few weeks off was not being able to make @twostraws inaugural Hacking with Swift Live event that was held in early July. Overall the event seems to have been a real success through, raising over $30,000 for charity and as an added bonus many of the talks are also now available online for your viewing pleasure.

If you’re looking for a wider view on mobile app development then make sure you also check out this batch of videos from ADDC 2019 covering app design, user experience, SwiftUI and a little Android (if you’re feeling adventurous)!