02/17 - The Best iOS Development Links
The best iOS development links from February 2017.
News
The second month of the year is already over! And February was an interesting month for iOS developers. The most interesting news is of course the announcement of WWDC 2017. Furthermore, Apple has announced the holiday quarter results, and they were terrific: $78.4b in revenue and $17.89 billion in profit from 78.3m iPhones, 13m iPads, and 5.3m Macs sold. There are also very interesting rumours about the iPhone 8 and new iPads. It’s gonna stay interesting!
Swift
Swift 4 Release Process: “This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.”
Classes That Conform To Protocols: “The other day, someone asked how to have a variable which stores a UIView that also conforms to a protocol. In Objective-C, you would simply write UIView<HeaderViewProtocol>. In current Swift, you can’t write something like that. This posts shows two workarounds.”
What’s new in Swift 3.1: “Swift 3.1 is a small, backwards-compatible update to Swift 3.0, cleaning up a few advanced features in preparation for more serious changes coming when Swift 4.0 is announced in June.”
Getting to Swift 3: “Airbnb has been using Swift since the language’s inception. We’ve seen many benefits from using this modern, safe, community-driven language. Until recently, a large part of our codebase had been in Swift 2. We’ve just finished our migration to Swift 3, right in time for the release of Xcode that drops Swift 2 support. We want to share with the community our approach to this migration, the effect Swift 3 has had on our app, and some technical insights we gained along the way.”
All you need to know about JSON: “JSON, stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It’s the de facto standard for server-client data communication. In this post, we will go over a few concepts about data and demo using JSON in a Xcode Playground. You are encouraged to try out and modify examples.”
iOS Development
Grand Central Dispatch Tutorial for Swift 3: Part 1/2: “Get up to speed with concurrency and parallelism in this in-depth two-part tutorial on Grand Central Dispatch.”
Using NSNotificationCenter in Swift: “NSNotificationCenter can be seen as a tool for communicating information within your app. Unlike push or local notifications where you are notifying a user of any content you would like them to receive, NSNotificationCenter allows us to send and receive information between classes and/or structs based on an action that has occurred in our app.”
Storyboard no more. Crafting (coding) a custom UIView: “If you work alone or in a small team storyboards should work fine but when you start working with more people on the same project or same features, storyboards start to be a headache. Prepare for trouble! And make it double!”
That API thing: What exactly is Cocoa? And is UIKit part of it?
Implementing delegates in Swift, step by step.: “So, what are delegates? …in software development, there are general reusable solution architectures that help to solve commonly occurring problems within a given context, these “templates”, so to speak, are best known as design patterns.”
10 Things You Go Through To Land Your First iOS Job: “Today, let’s focus our attention on 10 things that you’ll be faced with starting from job searching all the way to the final step of accepting the job offer. This will be extremely helpful for the people that have not gone through the process of successfully interviewing for an iOS job.”
On This Blog
UITableView: Automatic Row Heigth: UITableView is definitely one of the most important UI components, and you can find it in almost every app. Very often the content is dynamic – and so is the length of the content. In this case you need table view cells, that have different sizes. You could calculate these sizes manually, but that’s a little bit cumbersome. Instead, you can use automatic row height.
Merge Sort In Swift: There are a lot of sorting algorithms. In this post we will take a look at implementing merge sort in Swift.
3D Touch Quick Actions: Quick actions have been introduced with the iPhone 6S. When you force touch an app icon, a menu will be presented. You can use it, to quickly access a certain part of the app or to trigger an action.
My experiences using Apple’s Smart Keyboard: I have been using Apple’s Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro 9.7-inch intensively over the last few days and I’m quite surprised how useful it is. In fact, the iPad Pro has become a completely new device for me.
The 10 Best Productivity Apps On iOS: iOS has become an operating system that is not only great for consuming content, but for productivity as well. Of course you need the right apps though. Here’s a list of my favorite productivity apps.
3D Touch: Peek And Pop: Besides quick actions, peek and pop is another very interesting 3D Touch feature. By using it you can quickly preview content, for example emails or websites.
Android: Toast: On Android, a toast is used to display a short notice. For example, this could be the confirmation that an action has been completed successfully, like adding a favorite.
References
Title Image: @ Gustavo Frazao / shutterstock.com