Issue 278

25^th November 2016

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Happy Thanksgiving if you celebrated it! I hope you managed to take some time away from your computers for a short while! 🦃

Dave Verwer

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News

So the first major update to Swift playgrounds for iPad was released this week. It’s mainly a content update and shows a commitment to adding more learning material to the app as time goes on. The release brings part 3 of their “Learn to Code” series and a new “Hour of Code” challenge to tie in with the Computer Science Education week which is coming up in early December. I’m happy to see this.

Tools

Benjamin Encz wanted to understand the Thread Sanitizer better and so he implemented a version of it! The GitHub project has the code and the post linked here has an explanation of the algorithm. This is a really interesting way to learn more about the tools we use.

Let’s not get into the argument about building UI in Interface Builder vs doing it in code, but if you’re looking to convert a UI from IB you’ve got some work on your hands. This tool by Brian King is available as a web app, or as a command line tool and will take a XIB file (but not a storyboard) and write out a loadView method for you. There will still be work to do after using this, but it should give you a start.

Antoine Lee with a great tip for getting a better start at the conversion from Swift 2.x to 3. It’s logical that this works, but I’d have never thought to run it twice myself.

Code

This is very cool. It’s a library that takes After Effects scenes and renders them as full quality vector animations for your iOS or Android app. It’s the technology behind the animated emoji in the Facebook apps and puts a very powerful tool within reach of easy implementation. There’s some more information about it in this a post by Mark Peng.

Chris Eidhof on protocols in Swift. He argues that since the popular session at WWDC 2015, protocol oriented programming has become overused in Swift development, sometimes to the detriment of the code that’s being written. He goes through an example and examines the code with and without protocols. Really good article.

Ole Begemann with an investigation into what RawRepresentable actually does. He digs below the syntactic sugar and discovers that raw values can be more than strings and numbers.

If you’ve been doing any work the server with Swift you might be missing Core Graphics which is not available outside of macOS. Of course, there are other graphics libraries available, such as libgd and to help you out, Paul Hudson has wrapped this library for Swift for you.

Design

Even in the early days of iOS there were been several different types of modals available to developers. These days though, the array of choices that we have can be overwhelming. Kamil Kołodziejczyk has put together an overview of all the options along with a guide on what to use when.

Videos

Amy Dyer with a really fantastic talk on integrating Swift with a large existing Objective-C codebase. It’s the story of how they tackled the problem at Etsy where their code was spread across 4 Objective-C apps and how they learned to become comfortable with being a two language company rather than trying to rewrite everything.

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And finally...

It’s a good news/bad news situation. 😀