Weekly Cocoa

Big announcements from IBM and Apple. Watson Services for Core ML and ClassKit were introduced. But this didn’t stop the community from doing excellent work and preparing dozens of interesting articles. All links are waiting for you below.

News

Introducing ClassKit for Education Apps

Apple Special Event has just finished. The new framework ClassKit will be available with iOS 11.4 and developer tools will be introduced with Xcode 9.4 beta.

Introducing IBM Watson Services for Core ML

Cooperation between Apple and IBM is very tight. IBM introduced “Watson Services for Core ML” which is available directly from IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple. This and other IBM CLoud services will be closely integrated with Apple platform.

Developer Insights Series: App Store Product Page

Check out some tips and tricks on how to engage users with your App Store product page from people behind Concepts, Grokker, TypeShift, War Dragons, and codeSpark Academy. Apple gave us a tool which helps monetize applications.

Vapor 3.0 RC 2

Vapor 3 is close to finish. The new version will use SwiftNIO under the hood.

Development

Pass data backward more elegantly without using delegation

Delegation pattern has been a root concept in Cocoa and CocoaTouch for many years. But as time goes by, new concepts are born. Raymond Law presents routing as an alternative. Give it a try.

Do you often forget [weak self]? Here’s a solution

Improved and less error-prone delegate implementation. Combine the best from delegates and closures to make a cleaner solution for delegates without worrying about retain cycles.

How to make a copy of a Core Data SQLite database

Making a safe copy of a Core Data database while an application is running is not so easy. But there is a solution for that presented by Ole Begemann.

A helper for working with temporary files in Swift

Glorious and simple tool for working with temporary files from Swift.

Trunk-Based Development

Are you devoted to Git flow? Or maybe have some doubts and you’re on the lookout for something more suitable? Here’s a good article that makes an attempt at convincing mobile devs to try something different.

Feature flags in Swift

We can see a bit of a theme this week. If you want to try out Trunk-Based Development, you have to introduce feature flags into your codebase, else your integration branch will be constantly blocked. Even if you’re good with your current approach, A/B Tests are something potentially very fruitful and can use those flags as well.

How to Improve Code Comments with Little Refactorings

An important advice on refactoring that you can apply when you’re boy-scouting while implementing something else. Such a small change, but makes a huge difference.

Using Synced Realms

Not only can Realm replace CoreData in an iOS project, but it can also be used in the Cloud and replace CloudKit. Check the necessary setup and try Realm working on multiple devices simultaneously.

Making illegal states unrepresentable

You have to be careful when using Cocoa API. A lot of calls returns multiple values and very often those are optional. Making a wrong assumption can lead to incorrect behaviour.

Other

In which I get hacked, In which I get hacked, Part 2 & In which I get hacked, Part 3

Last week, http://ericasadun.com/ has been hacked. Check the insights from Erica Sadun on what happened.

Review: Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane

Review of the Continuous Delivery for Mobile with fastlane book by Doron Katz.

Five Options for iOS Continuous Delivery without Fastlane

Fastlane saved almost 12 million developer hours and currently is the only complete solution for iOS CI/CD but it isn’t perfect. Check 5 alternatives for Fastlane.

Against third party dependencies

Things to consider when choosing a third party dependency for your project.