Sponsored Link
Find An iOS Dev Job Through Vettery
Vettery specializes in developer roles and is completely free for job seekers. Interested? Submit your profile, and if accepted, you can receive interview requests directly from top companies growing their mobile dev teams. Get Started.
News
CocoaPods 1.9 Beta
Even with Xcode support for the Swift Package Manager, there's still plenty going on in CocoaPods world. This new release includes support for pod authors to ship xcframework
releases, and specify what versions of Swift are supported. Read about those, and all of the other features that'll be arriving soon.
Tools
Open in GitHub from Xcode
This little tool from Wojtek Lukaszuk is cute. If your code is hosted on GitHub then just right-click anywhere in a source file and instantly get a sharable link to it. If you're not using GitHub, it should be fairly easy to adapt to many other git providers. 👍
CodePecker
I've linked to Periphery a few times over the years, a tool that finds unused code in your apps. It looks like it's not quite up to date for Xcode 11 right now, so this new tool from Roy might be a good alternative. 👍
Code
Objective-C Direct Methods
Remember when I mentioned a few weeks back that I'd still link to Objective-C articles/posts if they were still being written? Well... here you go! I'm not just doing it to keep you happy either, this is fascinating. A new method dispatch mechanism? That's wild. Let's read what it's all about with Mattt, shall we?
Responsibly crashing your apps
Donny Wals, who has been busy this month on something that I'm also a great believer in. Crash early, crash often. I'd much rather find out about a potential issue while I'm developing than let it get anywhere near a shipping app.
Throttle and debounce in Combine
Joseph Heck, author of the wonderful (and continuously updated) Using Combine book talking about throttle and debounce in Combine. Highly recommended reading.
macOS Development
SwiftUI for Mac
Almost everything on SwiftUI that I've linked to since June has been SwiftUI on iOS, or maybe watchOS, but how about macOS? I'm actually really excited about this technology on the Mac, and so is Sarah Reichelt. Here's her three-part series (1, 2, 3) on getting started with SwiftUI for macOS apps.
Business and Marketing
Find ALL of the links to your apps on Twitter
What a fantastic tip from Stuart Hall for finding any links to your apps on Twitter. This is normally pretty hard to do, as so many bits of the URL are variable, or optional. The App ID is always there though, and this Twitter search trick is a great way to search for just that in any URL. 🤯
Videos
Videos from ServerSide.swift 2019
After my comment today, it might be the perfect time to dive into learning some server-side Swift. How about doing that with these videos from the Server-side Swift conference.
Jobs
Swift Engineer @ WillowTree – At WillowTree, Swift Engineers have the freedom to create products people love. You’ll collaborate with a cross-disciplinary team to build large-scale products for well-known brands. We look for team members who advocate for software engineering best practices and inspire their team to continuously learn and improve. – Charlottesville VA
Senior iOS Developer @ Papershift – Be at the center of our new in-house mobile team that will reimagine both the design and technology behind our time tracking and shift planning apps to provide the best possible experience for both businesses and consumers alike. And yes, we are migrating to SwiftUI, today! 😍 – Karlsruhe Germany
Looking to start the new year with a new challenge? There are plenty more jobs over at iOS Dev Jobs!
Comment
I've been peeking at the provisional results from the iOS Developer Community Survey, and one set of really fascinating answers are in the Swift on the server section. I won't spill the beans on what the results are until after the survey closes in January, but I can't wait to reveal how everyone is thinking about Swift as a back-end language.
On that same subject, this week has been full of server-side Swift news. First, Ian Partridge and Chris Bailey from IBM are stepping down from the SSWG. Like many others, I'd also like to thank them both for everything they have done for Swift and Swift on the server so far. 🎉 Their departure from the SSWG is sad news of course, but I don' t think it's necessarily a mark of doom.
I'm no expert on Swift on the server, so I'm not going to write much here, but with Vapor still going strong, and new server-side frameworks for Swift continuing to pop up it's still very early days for Swift as a server language.
Will it be a mainstream success? I think it's far too early to make a judgement on that. My gut feeling says Apple would need to put much more public, and explicit support to one of the frameworks (or make their own?) for that to be likely, but this announcement certainly doesn't kill it.
Talking of Vapor, this week also saw a "What's new in Vapor 4" post pop up on the forums. It's in beta right now, and there are some exciting developments in there like a background task mechanism, integrated APNS support, and a new model API. 👍
Like last year, I'll not be taking my normal week off next week. Instead, there will be another "Best of the year in And Finally..." for you all to enjoy, so keep an eye out for that.
I hope you all have a fantastic break for the holidays, and once again, as always thank you for your attention and support this year. Happy Holidays! 🎄
Dave Verwer