Issue 428

Comment

Blog posts can be great at presenting bite-sized chunks of knowledge, but it's hard to learn a technology from start to finish with random individual posts. So, with that in mind, I'd like to start this week with a round-up of all the books that have been written this summer to cover SwiftUI and Combine!

If you really want to understand these technologies, and you will want to, then you could do a lot worse than picking up one (or more) of these books, all written by members of our wonderful community.

A SwiftUI Kickstart by Daniel Steinberg.
Hacking with Swift (updated for SwiftUI) by Paul Hudson.
SwiftUI by Tutorials by Antonio Bello, Phil Łaszkowicz, Bill Morefield, and Audrey Tam.
Combine by Tutorials by Scott Gardner, Shai Mishali, Florent Pillet, and Marin Todorov.
SwiftUI Views by Mark Moeykens.
SwiftUI for the rest of us by Mohammad Azam.
Using Combine by Joseph Heck.

I should make it clear that I haven't read all of these books myself. I have received promo/review copies of a couple of them, but I tried to make this list as comprehensive as possible rather than opinionated!

News

A new way to control your Mac, iPhone and iPad entirely with your voice

Did you, like me, look on in awe at the demo video of Voice Control during the WWDC opening keynote? Have you, like me, not actually tried it yourself yet? I noticed Steven Aquino's mention of this white paper recently and thought I should actually spend some time with it. Give it a read, it's only short, and then switch it on and give it a go. We can only make our apps more accessible if we truly understand these features.

Tools

xcdiff

Can you imagine a situation where you have two developers working on the same Xcode project file? If you work on a team, you almost certainly can! That's where this tool from Marcin Iwanicki, Kassem Wridan, and Adam Khazi will come in handy.

App Icon Preview

What does your app icon look like on the home screen? On the App Store search page? Or, when it's top of the App Store charts? 🤞 No need to mess around with embedded Smart Objects in Photoshop files with this site from Max Ott though. Just upload an icon and off you go!

Code

SwiftUI: Setting Environment Values

Chris Eidhof with a fantastic explanation of how the environment in which every SwiftUI lives actually works under the hood. There's also a very useful little property wrapper in this post that allows close inspection of that environment. 👍

JBCalendarDatePicker

I love this new UI component from Josh Birnholz. It's a beautiful implementation of a date picker, but I really love that it was designed as a Catalyst component! I did wonder if we'd start seeing this happen, and sure enough…

WaterfallGrid

I linked to QGrid back in Issue 414, but what if you need an irregular grid of content in your shiny new SwiftUI app? Paolo Leonardi has put together this control that should sort you out.

View composition in SwiftUI

Containers in SwiftUI are limited to having only ten child views. This restriction can sound ugly, but I think it is awesome.

Constraints can often be really good for you, and I agree with Majid Jabrayilov that this one is often an advantage, even if it is probably going to be removed in the future!

Design

SF Symbols App Update

There's no new symbols, but it's a solid update to the macOS viewer app. Having to watch for tweets like this to get updates is a little frustrating though, if only there were a way to have it auto-update! 😬

Also, if you're looking for a quick and easy way to get SF Symbol information on your iOS devices, I noticed SF Viewer from Aaron Pearce also shipped this week!

Everyone else is doing it...

Luke Wroblewski with a short video clip on the dangers of saying "successful app is doing this, so we should do it too! The whole talk is worth a watch. Great stuff.

Up to Speed

Swiftly

I love this. Short, concise, example-based explanations of Swift keywords and concepts. Even if you're not just getting up to speed this is going to be a great reference! You can also read the announcement blog post from Eugene Belinski if you'd like a bit more information.

Videos

Videos from FrenchKit 2019

This week's dose of conference videos comes to you courtesy of the wonderful FrenchKit conference from just a few short weeks ago.

Jobs

iOS Engineer @ onX – If you’re passionate about writing great code, love playing outside, believe in protecting access to public lands and want to dominate the off-pavement mobile GPS market, then come join onX! Based in Montana, but open to remote for Senior level. – Bozeman MT, Missoula MT, or Remote

iOS Engineer @ Five Good Friends – We're an Aged Care and NDIS service provider made up of good people using helpful software. You'll be taking over the reins of our iOS app from our CTO to become its dedicated owner. This is a nimble, indie-like position where you'll craft everything from big pieces of architecture through to little pieces of polished interactions. – Brisbane, or Remote within Australia

iOS Developer @ Bandsintown – Bandsintown is a concert discovery and recommendation app powered by over 500,000 artists and serving over 50 million users. We're looking for an iOS Developer to join the team and help us continue to be the leading product in our field. – San Diego CA

Senior iOS Engineer @ Scoop – Have you ever dreaded a long commute? So have we. We're a small iOS team that's improving the lives of commuters. Our app is 100% Swift, well-architected, and well tested using industry best practices. Work with a fun highly-collaborative team that's making a real impact on people's lives, join Scoop! – San Francisco CA

Senior iOS Developer @ Fresh – We design Apple Award winning apps for startups and enterprise customers like Netflix and Facebook. Join our Swift development team and enjoy flexible work hours from wherever home is. – Remote, or Provo UT

Are you looking for a new challenge? There are plenty more jobs available on iOS Dev Jobs.

And finally...

File this one under "Icons are hard" 😂

Issue 428 November 1st 2019