Give your simulator superpowers

RocketSim: An Essential Developer Tool
as recommended by Apple

Issue 57
Apr 06, 2021

How to keep up with the iOS Community?

It's a question I often get asked through DMs on Twitter or direct emails. It's also subject to this week's Swift Community live recording by Vincent Pradeilles.

Let's start with one thing: You'll miss a lot, and you won't know everything. I'm doing my very best to collect the most interesting articles for this newsletter, but I find myself reading many other great articles I missed through other newsletters.

I find Twitter to be a great medium to stay up to date on iOS-related news. Following fellow iOS developers often brings me in the right spot to know about a new Xcode release (or April Fools jokes).

If that's not enough, you can check out iosfeeds.com. I'm using it as my source of inspiration for this newsletter as the iOS Dev Directory backs it. If you have a personal blog, I encourage you to add your RSS feed to this directory.

Next: newsletters. I'm doing my best to bring you the most valuable posts of the week, but it will only be based on what I think you'll find interesting. If you don't want to miss anything, I recommend subscribing to:

Lastly, you can follow me on Twitter if you didn't do so yet, and I'll make sure you get a good mix of the latest Swift news and chickens and dogs and cats.

Enjoy this week's SwiftLee Weekly!

THIS WEEK'S BLOG POST
This year's WWDC it's already two years since the Combine framework was introduced. It's time to revisit the Getting Started article I've written in 2019 and bring you up to date to start with Combine today.

TWEET OF THE WEEK
I reference Jérôme Alves a lot lately, and that’s for a good reason. He often shares great tips on code improvements, and this is another one in that family. This time, he shares his approach on a question posted by Peter Steinberger.

SPONSORED
ViRE is a Visual Regular Expressions tool: Readable Regex • Code Complete / Cheat Sheet • Unit Tests • Powerful Replace System • Step-by-Step Search & Replace • Regex Visual Scheme • Regex History / Playground. ViRE is available on Mac & iPad.

CURATED FROM THE COMMUNITY

CODE
Not many of us develop custom internet browsers, so it might be useful to limit the browsing capabilities of our apps. Keith Harrison explains how you can use a new API introduced in iOS 14 to bound browsers to specific domains.
If there’s lesser-known in the title, there must be value in it for my subscribers, right? There has been a lot of value in this article for me, at least. John Sundell taught me a few Formatter types you might not use often, but if you do, you’re happy they exist!
Property Wrappers still feel relatively new, but only this newsletter already contains several good use cases. I personally love Property Wrappers as they allow me to hide implementation details and reuse common patterns. Oleg Dreyman shares a neat implementation to hide private information from within logs.
Earlier I’ve written about NSOrderedSet as a great ordered alternative to Arrays, but I wonder whether that’s still the case. With the release of this new framework by Apple, we got ourselves a new OrderedSet implementation!
Before you get too excited: the code is not production-ready. However, the ideas behind the code examples shared are pretty interesting, I would say. It once again confirms we need new Core Data APIs, and I wouldn’t be disappointed if it would take a little inspiration from this post by Dave Delong.
You could say Dave Delong has been busy. You can also state that he loves Property Wrappers. He shares some inspiring implementations from which this article shares custom implementations to use with SwiftUI.

META
An often asked question: “What does it take to become an iOS Developer?”. A question that’s always relevant and its answer often changes with new frameworks like SwiftUI. Paul Hudson gives his answer to this question in this 53 minutes long video.
We all use fonts, and we all set font sizes. Do we also know how a font size is used and calculated? I didn’t know it at least, but after reading this post, I got myself a lot more insights!

NEWS
It is just a little homework and a friendly reminder for all us developers using the device's advertising identifier for tracking purposes.