Issue 458

29^th May 2020

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

I’ve been reflecting on SwiftUI this week now that it’s been public for almost a year. 🎂 I’ve also been thinking about what might be on the cards in three weeks time, at this year’s WWDC. 🎉

So, what’s the big, flashy announcement going to be this time? 🤩 I do have a wish list, but I’ll be more than happy with just one thing. A more stable, well documented, second release of SwiftUI that also fills in a few of the most glaring gaps in functionality and evens out the platform support (especially macOS).

(If I can fit my “one thing” into one sentence that counts, right? 😬)

I won’t be upset if there are major syntax changes. I think if you adopted SwiftUI in production code last year, it should have been with the expectation that there would be a cost to that decision. I also don’t mind if the expansion in functionality is moderate. SwiftUI is the future of iOS development, and it’s worth taking time to get it right. My hope is that this year’s release feels as well thought out, and considered as last year’s felt mind-blowing. As a result, I hope this is the year where SwiftUI can begin to make sense in the majority of iOS projects. 🤞

I can’t wait to see whether Apple agree!

Dave Verwer

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News

Adrian Ross with another project based on the list of blogs that go to make the iOS Dev Directory. He’s exposing all of the content from the RSS feeds as searchable! 🚀 Would you like your content to be indexed by this search? You know what to do!

Tools

The storyboard editor in Xcode can certainly be a little sluggish, but there are a few things you can do to make everything flow just a little bit more smoothly. Axel Kee takes us through it.

Code

This is a great article by Sarun Wongpatcharapakorn, but this is much harder than it should be in an iOS app. I’d rather do most layout tasks in UIKit/SwiftUI, but when it comes to this kind of responsive flip, I pine for Flexbox.

Gone are the days when showing the camera picker would take up 95% of the iPhone’s available RAM, so it’s probably been a while since you had to deal with running out of memory. That’s not the case in an extension though, where resources are far more limited! Igor Kulman tells us a story of image resizing.

Harshil Shah has also been remembering back to the introduction of SwiftUI. I enjoyed his recap here of function builders, the feature of SwiftUI that makes SwiftUI possible. 👍

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the technique Luke Smith shows us here, but I think I love it! 😂

Design

This is really smart design from Christian Selig for taking what could be an annoying situation for a user and just making the app do the right thing. They say that great design is invisible, and this is exactly that. 😍

Business and Marketing

Your first app doesn’t need to be (and you could argue shouldn’t be) your magnum opus. It’s a great idea to get something out there as quick as possible, you’ll learn invaluable lessons while you do. That’s exactly what Daniel Gauthier did over six weeks in April and May, and he was kind enough to write up the timeline, and some thoughts on the process. 👍

Up to Speed

If you’re learning Swift, and have a question, there’s a good chance it’s answered here by the always prolific Paul Hudson. It’s remarkable just how much content he puts out, there are almost 100 posts here. 🤯

Jobs

Mobile Software Engineer @ Doximity – Doximity, the social network for doctors and healthcare workers, is hiring passionate iOS engineers (remote friendly!) with 5+ years of experience. You’ll get to be part of an amazing product team and work on an app that is used by over 70% of US doctors to help them deliver better patient care. Use your skills (Swift, Obj-C, FRP) to improve lives and make the world a better place. – San Francisco, or Remote (within US timezones)

Want more job listings? iOS Dev Jobs has them.

And finally...

git commit and ⌘W, ⌘W, ⌘W, ⌘W, ⌘W, ⌘W, and ⌘W.