Issue 251

20^th May 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Chris Lattner made an announcement this week about the scope of the 3.0 release. The good news is that the date won’t (or more likely, can’t) slip, but unfortunately the stable ABI is going to be pushed into Swift 4, where it will be the highest priority.

I’m not too worried about the postponing of the stable ABI. Yes it means a larger binary and an inability to use precompiled libraries, but I’m not sure that’s stopping a huge amount of people from adopting the language. Note, I’m not saying it’s not stopping anyone, just that the group this affects is fairly small.

How much of this postponement is due to the massive success of the open source Swift project? The community has contributed a huge amount of proposals for the language, and many of them have been implemented or are targeted for 3.0.

My guess? It’s likely that this volume of high quality community input came as a surprise to the Swift team. Certainly, if it was still closed source, the scope and features of Swift 3 would have been different.

Is this a good thing? Well, delays are proof that the Swift team aren’t superhuman and Apple need to keep an eye on priorities. However, I’d say it’s a net positive, and I’m pretty happy with how the development process for Swift has turned out.

Dave Verwer

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News

This is a surprising move from Apple! Links to AltConf, Layers, Jim’s Beard Bash and The Talk Show Live have all been added to the official WWDC site. These events (and others) all make San Francisco an even more amazing place to be during that week, and deserve to be celebrated. Bravo.

Dear Santa Craig. I’ve been a very good developer this year, and would like it very much if you would add this feature to iOS. Unless the elves are already working on something like this for iOS 10, this would continue the great work you all did with deep links. This would give a huge boost to app discovery, which is something the store really needs. Thanks very much! Dave

Tools

It’s early days for stats like these as the Swift package manager is not yet officially released. However this list of the most popular packages and package authors is going to be something to watch as the package manager gets more adoption. Thanks to Honza Dvorsky for putting this together.

Code

Olivier Halligon with a great four part series (1, 2, 3, 4) on pattern matching in Swift. This has been in my list of pending links for weeks now, but I wanted to wait until the series was finished before posting it. You should read all four parts.

I liked this illustrated summary of the major Swift 3.0 changes by Paul Hudson. It’s all very well seeing the proposals fly by, but code examples really help to show the impact of the changes and that’s what you’ll get here.

New networking library from Elvis Nuñez which shipped a 1.0 this week. It’s designed to be a lightweight wrapper around NSURLSession and friends, with good support for testing and simplicity at its core. Worth taking a look at.

I really liked this article by Natasha on adding an animation to a view using Swift protocols. It takes a simple, common problem and shows a clear benefit to the protocol oriented approach.

Design

This article isn’t so much about icons, but the other imagery that you can use to give your app some personality and colour. Nick Babich has some some good advice on what kind of images to use, how to format your content around the images and tips on how to ensure text stays legible.

Want to spend 13 minutes watching Michael Flarup design an icon for a Mac App? I did, and really enjoyed it.

Videos

An entertaining talk from Christin Gorman on the dangers of over-engineering. Yes, it’s a talk about Java for the web, but the concepts are still relevant.

Books

There’s plenty of books available covering Swift these days, but which one is right for you? Keith Harrison has some recommendations.

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And finally...

Made me chuckle… 😃