Issue 365

17^th August 2018

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

It’s been a quiet week apart from the beta 7/beta 8 dance, so let’s get straight to the links! 🚂

Dave Verwer

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News

Compared to the web sites for many open source projects I’d say Swift.org is well above average, but is it as good as it could be? Apple are asking for feedback on what would make the site more useful. There’s plenty of suggestions already but there’s always room for more!

I noticed this interesting conversation on Twitter at the end of last week. I hadn’t looked at resources for beginners in a long time and found some in here that were new to me. It’s easy to forget that there are still people who are brand new to Swift, iOS, and even mobile development arriving every day! 🎉

Tools

This was very nearly this week’s “And Finally…” link. 😂 But the more I thought about it, the more I grew to love this idea from Jason Pepas. It turned from something that made me smile (and still does!) into something I think is a genuinely useful technique. 👍

I love the idea of adding automated spell checking of the comments in code. Quality is everywhere, especially if you’re generating documentation from comments. William Meleyal shows us how they did it over at PSPFSDFKit. 😀

Sebastian Messeb with a great guide to a few different techniques for automating the setup of your projects on a new machine. As your apps grow in size/complexity, or if you work as part of a larger team you’ll want to look at putting something like this together. It’ll make a good replacement for your out of date README.md instructions, which I know is how you do it right now. 😎

You all know I’m a sucker for a debugging story, I always learn something and this one from Daniel Jalkut was no different. This time it was regular expression breakpoints.

Code

I came across this article from Krzysztof Siejkowski when he released this new obfuscater. I’m not a big believer in the need for obfuscation, but this article explaining how he built it is fascinating and definitely worth a read.

I’m not a big fan of customising alert views. It’s usually a better idea to implement a new view controller and present it in some way, which doesn’t always need to be full screen! There are instances where it’s appropriate though and I think this customisation from Ole Begemann is a good example. It was also fun watching this project progress throughout the week.

I’ve mentioned bottom sheets a couple of times recently but always in the Design section, with no code in sight. I liked Simon Kågedal Reimer’s article on the subject, especially how he dealt with the scrolling complexities.

Ben Dodson on this increasingly common use case now that Apple has adopted this kind of layout for a lot of “What’s new” UI. Oh and before you even say it… No, you shouldn’t just stick it in a web view! 😀

Design

I’ve seen a lot of talk recently about Adobe XD. I haven’t had a Creative Cloud subscription for years now after I moved to Sketch being my primary design tool. What I didn’t realise is however is that XD is free, at least for how I need to use it. It’s not going to tempt me away from Sketch, but it’s now an additional tool that doesn’t involve a $50/month commitment. If you haven’t yet checked it out, Simon Fairhurst has a good comparison written up.

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And finally...

You can’t rush these things! 🐌