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News
2020 iOS Conference Calendar
I always like to start the year by linking to a round-up of planned iOS conferences, and this year I've picked Alex Curylo's excellent round-up of events and their CFP links. There's a huge number of events planned, it's remarkable.
Also linked from the post, I really enjoyed Vadim Drobinin's post on submitting proposals to speak at conferences last year. Maybe 2020 will be the year of your first conference talk?
Talking of conferences, I'm off to iOSConf Singapore next week, which I'm very excited about! I hope to see some of you there!
Tools
Continuous Integration Using GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions have been publicly available for a few months now. With the generous limits that their free plan has, you may have been wondering whether you should be getting yourself set up with CI, even for your personal/hobby projects? Andreas Lรผdemann has a good write up of how to get started.
Also, this post from Jesse Squires on switching Xcode version with GitHub Actions is worth a read.
Five tips to write better TODOs in Xcode
There are some good tips in this article by Donny Wals for keeping your TODOs under control. I especially like the idea of adding a date to every one of them. If you haven't TODONE it after a few months, did it really need doing?
Code
Building Better Views
A new way to think about your app's architecture, without the need to throw everything away and start again? Without even a fancy new acronym? Surely that can't possibly be worth reading about, can it? ๐ I liked this post from Joe Fabisevich, mainly because the idea is really simple. If you're left with questions after reading it, he's probably answered them in this follow-up post.
The iOS internationalization basics I keep forgetting
Localizations, locales, timezones, date and currency formatting... it's shocking how easy is to forget how they work and how to use them correctly.
Alberto De Bortoli with a great summary of the basics of making sure your app doesn't look out of place, wherever it's running.
Exploring SwiftUI Apple Watch Performance
Is SwiftUI running on an Apple Watch performant enough to run a game? Maybe not Fortnite, but as David Smith proves in his latest post it can handle more pong balls than are practical. ๐
You can use SwiftUI today
Not everything you build needs to be seen by a million end-users. Wonderful advice here from Guilherme Rambo about building your own tools.
Jobs
Senior iOS Software Engineer @ The Stars Group โ We are looking for a Senior iOS Software Engineer to join our busy and dynamic Global Sportsbook Trading Platform team in our Leeds office. Come and join the new team building the exciting new products featuring rock-solid stability, high velocity code-shipping and ground-breaking innovation. โ Leeds UK
Senior iOS Developer @ Dr. Bill โ Dr. Bill saves time for Canadian doctors by making medical billing delightful (OK... at least suck less). Join us and help lead our team as we accelerate our growth to dominate medical billing in Canada! โ Vancouver Canada, or Remote
Software Engineer, iOS @ Wikimedia Foundation โ The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Software Engineer to join the iOS team. You will be responsible for thoughtfully crafting user experiences that empower and delight our users. You will work closely with the rest of the team to collaboratively iterate on new ideas. In this role, you will create new features, fix bugs, and define the future of Wikipedia on mobile devices. โ San Francisco CA, or Remote
Mobile Full Stack Engineer @ Expensify โ 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. โ London UK, Portland OR, or San Francisco CA
Is your company hiring? Why not get yourself a new teammate who already subscribes to iOS Dev Weekly by listing any open positions at your company over at iOS Dev Jobs? Standard listings are free, so there's no reason not to! ๐
And finally...
Read this wonderful story (and this twitter thread) that goes back twenty years. You won't regret it!
Comment
When Apple announced SwiftUI last year, it was instantly apparent that adopting it in 2019 was going to be... challenging. ๐ฌ It's an entirely new way to write apps, it's iOS 13 only, and the less said about the confusing compiler error messages the better.
One of those things got much better this week with the passing of the cutoff date for Swift 5.2, and the appearance of the first nightly releases. They include the new diagnostic architecture that promises to drastically improve the compiler's ability to pinpoint code that's causing a problem. It's early days, but looking at this tweet from Steve Riggins, this is a huge step forward for SwiftUI, as well as for Swift in general.
It's also worth repeating that if you haven't started to implement anything in SwiftUI yet, it's still super early! If you take a look at the number of SwiftUI blog posts compared to the number of UIKit posts published since last June, you might think you were already falling behind. You're not. Everything is fine. ๐
As far as I know, there's no public release date for 5.2 yet, but I'd expect it to arrive in an Xcode 11 point release, rather than with Xcode 12. Things are looking bright for SwiftUI in 2020!
Dave Verwer