Issue 206 – November 12th 2019

The Swift Server Working Group (SSWG) was set up a year ago to help define and prioritize the efforts surrounding Swift on the Server. This week, @tanner0101 has posted, on behalf of the group, an update on the groups progress in terms of process, libraries and tooling along with an outline of the focus areas for 2020.

Another exciting announcement this week has come from @stephentyrone with the arrival of a brand new Swift Numerics project that will provide the basic building blocks for numerical computing in Swift including support for a bunch of mathematical functions for both real and complex numbers. Click on the link to find out more.

With technologies, frameworks, tools and languages continuing to be released at an ever-increasing pace how do you choose when to adopt new technologies and when to wait? @swiftbysundell provides some tips.

Interesting editorial from @bradleychambers looking at app subscriptions and the issues they raise for developers and users alike. Beyond clearly articulating why many developers are moving to a subscription-based business model what I found most interesting were the comments below the article. I think it’s fair to say, app subscriptions, and especially the transition to a subscription-based model is still a divisive topic and needs to be handled with care.

Whilst recent changes in frameworks like iCloud Keychain, Shared Web Credentials, Password Autofill, Universal Links and Sign in with Apple have gone a long way to minimizing the friction of account creation and authentication, there are still a few cases that aren’t entirely covered by these new features. In this article, @mattt attempts to address one such case – how to do seamless “passwordless” authentication via email on iOS.

In this two-part series ( Part 1 , Part 2 ), @dmtopolog takes a look at some of the different options we have for customising the navigation bar in UIKit and digs into some of the detail of a new option available to us in iOS 13 – UINavigationBarAppearance.

Whilst the official Swift book is a great resource for getting up to speed with the Swift language it can be a little dense and there are times when you just want a quick reference for that language feature that is just escaping your memory. With that in mind, check out this new project from @EugeneBelinski which might be just the Swift quick reference your looking for. Whilst you’re there make sure you also check out Eugene’s companion project iOS Ref which can also be a useful reference to have on hand.

Beginning with Catalina (10.15) Apple now requires that all software distributed outside of the Mac App Store to be signed and notarized. gon is a simple, no-frills, CLI from

@mitchellh to help automate that process supporting code signing, packaging, notarization and more. An ideal addition to your automation pipeline.

Menus and toolbars are a fundamental part of almost every Mac app that has ever been written. Learn the basics of how to build your own with this step-by-step tutorial from @gabtheodor .

In this tutorial from @LotUDev , you’ll learn how to greatly simplify your networking code by using SwiftNIO’s Futures and Promises to build an API helper library to abstract away the details of your networking API into a set of simple Swift functions.