Issue 425

Comment

I'd like to start this week with a quick update on the Swift PM Library. 🚀 It's still early days in terms of calling it a success, but I've been happy to see a very positive reaction from almost everyone so far.

Some people didn't stop after visiting the site and doing a few searches though… A few curious visitors dug in and found that the site is comprised of a static HTML page, and some JavaScript that interacts with a JSON API. This has led to a couple of interesting spin-off projects springing up. 🌱

First of all, SwiftLibrary from Kilian Koeltzsch – A command-line search tool built on top of the SwiftPM Library API.

Then, the Swift Dependency Graph from Adam Fowler – A wonderful visualisation of package dependencies that doesn't use the API I built, but does use the package source list.

Plenty of people have also been submitting pull requests to add their packages, and I recently merged this huge one from Kyle Newsome which brought the total number of packages being indexed to over 3,400! 🚀

Finally, I've also made some improvements to the search engine that should make packages easier to find (what a revelation eh? Search improvements that make packages easier to find! 😂). It did involve some fairly major changes behind the scenes though, so let me know if anything seems wonky! 🙈

News

Catalytic Converter

So macOS Catalina is here and with it, the first set of Catalyst apps. The conversation on Catalyst has been mostly drowned out by this all summer, so it was fascinating for me to read James Thomson's piece on his experimentation with potentially bringing PCalc, and actually bringing Dice to Catalyst. 😬

Sharing the MongoDB Realm Roadmap

After reading Realm's "The Future is Bright" post as they were acquired by MongoDB followed by silence for almost 6 months, I was starting to get a little nervous that the next post might be an "Our Incredible Journey". This is certainly not that though, and I'm hopeful that Realm will be around for many more years to come.

Tools

What is Module Stability in Swift and why should you care?

It feels like we've been talking about ABI stability for years now… Why? Well, we have been! I think Swift 5.1 finally puts the matter to bed, and Donny Wals is here to give us a good summary of what it all means.

Code

Swift 5.1 Two Quick Tips

I really didn't like the change to return in Swift 5.1 when I first read about it. I never particularly loved that feature of Ruby and it felt weird that it was available inconsistently in Swift, only being optional when a function is a single line of code. However, now I've lived with it for a few weeks, I really love it. It's the perfect combination of convenience for trivial function bodies, without the potential confusion on where functions actually return when they get bigger. Keith Harrison talks about this change, and then another!

Faster UIActivityViewController Share Sheets with UIActivityItemProvider

Dan Griffin with a quick and simple post on speeding up your share sheets. I can think of several apps on my phone right now that clearly aren't doing this. ⏳

Common Cryptographic Operations With CryptoKit

One announcement that didn't get a lot of attention this year was the introduction of a new security framework, CryptoKit. Finally, no more wrangling with CommonCrypto to get robust hashing and encryption functionality. Andy Ibanez has put together a comprehensive post here covering what it does, and a few things that it doesn't yet have support for.

objc_msgSend's New Prototype

It's been well over a year since we had a Mike Ash Friday Q&A. It's understandable given that he works for Apple these days, and that makes it even more of a treat when we are graced with one. Let's finish this week's Code section by finding out what happened to objc_msgSend in this year's releases, shall we? 🎉

Business and Marketing

Marketing Dark Noise

Numbers numbers numbers, everyone loves it when someone shows their numbers! Here's a great post from Charlie Chapman about his new app, Dark Noise. You may click through just to read the numbers, but make sure to stay for the excellent write up of his strategy and execution of the launch of a paid-up-front app.

Videos

Videos from NSSpain 2019

This year's NSSpain looked to be as good as ever, but if you missed it then you'll want to catch up with all of the content via this set of videos. 👍

Jobs

iOS Developer @ Dynamic Signal – Dynamic Signal’s Employee Communication and Engagement Platform is trusted by hundreds of enterprise companies, including more than 20 percent of the Fortune 100, to modernize, streamline, and measure their communication and engagement with one platform to reach all employees, wherever they work. – San Bruno, CA

Senior iOS Software Engineer @ pMD – pMD is a fast-growing, highly rated health care technology company rated 5/5 on Glassdoor and has been recognized as a Best Place to Work by SF Business Times, Modern Healthcare, and Inc. We're profitable, have extremely happy customers, and make up a team of people as talented and passionate as you are. We love what we do and care about doing good in the world. – Remote or San Francisco, CA

iOS Developer (Remote) @ komoot – Komoot is changing the way people explore. Our technology empowers millions of people to get outside and discover more of the great outdoors. If you’d like to help to build the future of outdoor exploration - we want you to join us! – Remote

Senior iOS Engineer @ Tally – Tally's goal is to make people less stressed financially and provide full financial automation to every one of our customers, for free. We've raised nearly $100 million in funding and have launched two products: Tally Cards to help people pay down their credit card balances faster, and Tally Save to help people save automatically and earn rewards. – San Francisco, CA or Vancouver, BC

Mobile Full Stack Engineer @ Expensify – Expensify seeks a self-driven and collaborative individual passionate about making code beautiful and effective, with a general understanding of and experience in JavaScript, Android and/or iOS SDKs, and mobile design patterns. PHP is a plus, but not a requirement. – London, Portland OR, or San Francisco CA

Mobile Application QA Engineer @ Bleachr – Bleachr, a maker of sports mobile applications that empower the fan, provides a stellar work environment, talented teammates, and an opportunity to make a significant contribution to this mature start-up. Be the architect of our automated test environment. – Minneapolis, MN

Are you looking for a job? There are plenty more jobs listed over at iOS Dev Jobs. You should go there, right now!

And finally...

If you look closely enough…

🕳

Note: Yes, I know it's not exactly the same. It did make me laugh though, and that's why you're all the way down here, past the jobs and everything else, right? 👋

Issue 425 October 11th 2019