Issue 196 – August 27th 2019

I liked this article from @vermont42 . It’s a good reminder of how valuable side projects can be, both as a creative outlet but also as a way of expanding your skills, growing your portfolio and potentially making some money on the side. Added to that, they’re just… well…. fun.

App Store Optimisation (ASO for short), encompasses a wide range of techniques to help your app gain more visibility in Apple’s App Store search algorithms and with competition in the store as fierce as ever, this checklist from the team at @appfigures is a useful place to start.

Modularity is the key to building large-scale, maintainable apps. This article from @bataleandro shows you how to use Cocoapods to package up different components within your application into separate modules keeping their interfaces clean and functionality independent.

Popular in the Java EE community, the Data Access Object pattern is a great way of isolating your user interface code from your persistence architecture making it easy to later swap out your persistence framework should you need to. This article from Sasmito Adibowo shows you how to implement this pattern in Swift and discusses some of the nuances of implementing it with UI-based applications and server-side Swift code.

You’ll have no doubt used subscripts to access elements within various Swift collections but where Swift differs from many languages, is the ability to add your own sub-scripting APIs just like those in Swift’s Standard Library. This weeks article from @johnsundell takes a look at how sub-scripting works behind the scenes and how you can make use of subscripts when designing your own APIs.

With context menus replacing 3D Touch peek and pop in iOS 13, @kylebshr has been digging into the UIContextMenu class and has written a comprehensive guide taking you from the basics through to more advanced features.

Learn how to pass system-wide settings around your SwiftUI app with this introductory article from @mecid exploring the concept of ‘Environment’ in SwiftUI.

I really liked this article from Ravi Aggarwal . It takes a look at the subject of ‘Backpressure’ in reactive systems along with some of the techniques we can use to cope with over-enthusiastic publishers. You’ll have to buy your own chocolates for this one though.

In recent years, Apple has been providing more and more mechanisms for apps to integrate with the core system services on iOS devices. In this post, @avi_tsadok shows you how to increase the visibility of your app content by integrating with one of these – Core Spotlight.

So you’ve downloaded a Swift package but it doesn’t quite do what you want and you need to change it. However, Swift packages are read-only in Xcode projects so what are you to do? @kharrison provides a nice tip on how to add a local copy of the package before overriding the package dependency in your Xcode project.

@twannl shows you how to track down performance problems, analysis memory usage and a whole lot more in this article on getting started with Apple’s flexible performance analysis and testing tool – Instruments.

Developing for macOS isn’t so different from developing for iOS but there are some subtle differences. This article from @gabtheodor focuses on how to use text controls on macOS.

On the video front this week, we have this collection of videos from the inaugural @SwiftConfTO conference held in Toronto on August 13th. From what I’ve seen so far the talks were great, covering a wide range of subjects from SwiftUI to server-side Swift. Great to see another conference being added to the community calendar.