Issue 265

26^th August 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

So I’ve received really mixed feedback on the change I made a couple of weeks ago to publishing on a Thursday. So, back to Friday we go! 🍻

I’m still going to put it together on a Thursday as that fits my schedule better, and doing it this way also means I’ll be able to maintain a consistent delivery time on Friday as it should all be done in advance, every week. However, the feedback was pretty clear that Friday works best for most of you. 👍 I’m glad you care! I’d have been worried if no-one had even commented on the change.

Happy Friday again!

Dave Verwer

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News

Daniel Dunbar with a quick update on the progress of the Swift Package Manager leading up to the release of Swift 3. Progress has certainly been made since the announcement last year but it’s still way too early to throw away your CocoaPods or Carthage dependencies. There’s a summary of progress so far and some information on the future direction of the project.

Tools

With no sign of clang-format getting Swift support, Nick Lockwood has had a go at solving the eternal problem of consistent code formatting, and is introducing SwiftFormat. Now all we need to do is all agree on what formatting options we should use. That should be easy! 😬

Wojtek Lukaszuk with a cute little tool that’ll analyse your Swift project for class dependencies. Point it at an Xcode project or workspace and it’ll tell you how many other classes each class depends on. Useful for finding those rogue classes that are doing too much.

Given that we’re still in beta with Xcode, theres a surprising number of these extensions for Xcode already floating around. Tibor Bödecs has a round up of what’s been released so far.

Code

Such a clear article by Chris Eidhof on mutating value types in Swift. If you still have any questions at all on this subject, this post should clear them up. It’s also a draft to a new section of the Advanced Swift book, which I can thoroughly recommend. (Note: This isn’t a sponsored link, I just like the book).

Steve Streza with a framework for making Auto Layout easier to use, especially when dynamically modifying your UI at runtime. Stack views solve many of the problems mentioned in the included video, but there’s still room for this when it’s not as simple as just stacking stuff. 🏢

Soroush Khanlou on the design of Swift and the choices that get made every day that affect it. The design of any language is always filled with opinions, otherwise we’d have solved programming languages 30 years ago and this is a balanced article that looks at the choices made and how they affect the language.

How much space do the Swift libraries really take up? David Owens investigates. It’s probably more than you think and worth paying attention to if you’re trying to stay under the 100Mb cellular download limit.

I’ve struggled with this too, it’s a slightly strange syntax that I can’t ever quite decide on the correct formatting for. I wonder how SwiftFormat deals with it? 🙈

Business and Marketing

I’m a strong believer that effectively editing your copy is just as important as the writing itself. This article by Jason Fried isn’t specific to creating marketing materials, but does have a really good exercise to try the next time you sit down at your text editor to write a blog post or other marketing copy. Why not give it a try?

Videos

I’m still figuring out how to link to all of the AltConf videos, but in the mean time you should watch this talk from Rob Elkin on the history and organisation of the conference.

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And finally...

Great picture. I also stole the joke in the title. 😀