Issue 241

11^th March 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So I was wrong last week about beta 5 being the last of this round of releases as we received all the beta 6 versions during this week. In terms of actual timing, several people wrote to me suggesting that it’s likely to all get released with a March event, and sure enough a few days later the date of that event was officially announced for the 21st. It does seem likely that we’ll see releases on or around that date so there’s really not too long to wait.

Dave Verwer

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News

I think by now there’s very little doubt left on whether Swift is going to be operated as a truly open source project, but if you still weren’t sure then this should put an end to your concerns. If you’ve had five non-trivial pull requests accepted into the project without modification, you’re able to be granted direct commit access. The way this project is being run continues to blow me away! 👏

Tools

Orta Therox with a video demonstrating using John Holdsworth’s Injection for Xcode plugin. Injection tools have been around for a while and always get people excited, but are they actually useful? Orta demonstrates how this plugin could be practically used to build a simple view controller and it certainly slashes the time of the build/run/check cycle. Would I actually use it though? I guess it depends on the project, but I’m probably going to stick with building manually. Very cool tech though.

Are MARK comments a bad code smell? Arkadiusz Holko argues that they might be. Certainly the suggestion of support inside Xcode for better labelling of extensions in the drop down menu is something I’d really welcome, and would cut down on the need for MARKs significantly.

Code

Michał Wojtysiak & Bartłomiej Woronin on VIPER. The post covers the basics, and then how they got to grips with it in a project. I also really liked that this article spends time questioning whether it’s a good fit for your project rather than simply proclaiming it as the new way apps should be architected.

Bryan Irace with a follow up to Soroush Khanlou’s post which I linked to in Issue 236 about creating behaviour based view controllers. The more I read about this idea, the more I like it. Worth a read.

Tuples aren’t something I find myself reaching for very often when writing Swift. If you’re in the same boat, you’ll want to read this post by Andyy Hope which might remind you to take another look. Oh and to settle the argument once and for all, it’s pronounced with a hard G… err, I mean it’s pronounced “t’pull” and not “chew pull” or “two pull”. 🙉

Marcin Krzyżanowski has gathered together everything he could find on the security settings in CloudKit. If you’re using CloudKit, you should read this.

Design

Great article by Nick Babich on being careful before putting up brick walls like mandatory sign in/register forms in front of users who are trying your app. Do you really need to have someone sign in before they can do anything? Those first few minutes of interaction are so critical, don’t ruin them with a brick wall.

Business and Marketing

A good reminder from Dan Counsell that just because everyone does something a certain way, you don’t necessarily have to follow the crowd. There’s also a link to his previous article on putting together a good press kit which is worth another read.

Videos

Aurelius Prochazka, the author of AudioKit, which is an extremely competent audio synthesis framework. The talk also makes great use of the new interactive playgrounds in Swift. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Books

Core Image is just for doing blurs, right? 😌 What’s this book all about then? I get the feeling that CI is one of those frameworks that many people underestimate. Luckily, this new book by Simon Gladman does a great job of really showcasing the full power of the framework, as well as giving detailed instructions on how to use it.

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And finally...

I’m never installing this. 🙈