The iOS Times

#49 - Different Cabbages on the Bus

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +1000

DifferenceKit

A “fast and flexible” diffing library with O(n) complexity for Swift collections shared by Ryo Aoyama. Based on Paul Heckel’s algorithm which other famous libraries use as well.

It comes with UITableView and UIVCollectionView extensions to implement incremental updates based on the evaluated diff.

Cabbage

Vito Zhang shares a video composition framework based on AVFoundation aiming to provide an easier to use API.

PasswordRules

Library by Mattt for defining strong password generator rules to combine together, as described in the recent NSHipster article “Password Rules / UITextInputPasswordRules”.

TopicEventBus

An implementation by Matan Abravanel of the publish-subscribe pattern for topic-based systems.

The author also has a post on Medium arguing that this pattern is better than using NSNotificationCenter.

Amazon’s AWS has a number of tools and services based on pub-sub, even if you’re keen on NSNotfications this is definitely a topic worth exploring.

Other Interesting Projects

literary-screensaver, a macOS screensaver showing the time in text form extracted by quotes from books.
GoogleMD-Icons, a collection of icons from the Google Material Design pack.
source-editor, a source editor for macOS and iOS. It’s pretty basic at this point in time, but looks like it’s easy to extend, could be a good project to contribute to.

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#48 - Coordinated Transport Services

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Swift NIO Transport Services

Earlier this year Apple released SwiftNIO an event-driven networking library, “a low-level tool for building high-performance networking applications in Swift.”.

This week they open sourced this extension library to support Apple platforms as “first-class citizens”. This is done via the Network.framework. Notice that this is only available on macOS 10.14+, iOS 12+, and tvOS 12+.

RxCoordinator

A reactive navigation framework based on the Coordinator pattern by Joan Disho and Stefan Kofler from Quick Bird Studios. You can use it to implement a fully Rx driven MVVM-C architecture.

Nano Blocks

Brothers Benjamin and Tim share an open source iOS wallet app for the Nano cryptocurrency.

Never heard of Nano… maybe I should start The Cryptocurrencies Times 🤔.

Other Interesting Projects

Swift-Clean Architecture. App implemented following Uncle Bob’s Clean Architecture.
TypingIndicator. A replica of iMessage’s typing indicator bubble with support for a variety of animations.

Thank you for reading The iOS Times.

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#47 - Preferred Fuzzy Twigs

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Preferences

This library by “full-time open-sourcerer” Sinder Sorhus promises to let yo add a preferences window to your macOS app in minutes.

“Just pass in some view controllers and this package will take care of the rest.”

Twig

Markdown and it’s GitHub Flavoured extension are my favourite way to write text. I’ve been writing this publication in .md files from the very first issue.

Twig by Luka Kerr is a very promising Markdown editor app for macOS, and what’s even better: it’s open source.

SwifterSwift

A community driven collection of more than 500 Swift extensions to get more out of the standard library, Foundation, UIKit, AppKit, and other Apple frameworks.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend installing the whole package, but I’m sure looking at the source you’ll find something useful and inspiring.

FuzzCheck

“A coverage-guided engine for Swift packages that works with typed values instead of raw binary buffers”.

In other words, given a test function (Input) -> Bool, it tries to find values of Input that will trigger edge cases in your code, and does it in a performant way.

Author Loïc Lecrenier warns that the project is not ready for production yet. It would be great to see where this tool can go to help with automated testing and finding bugs.

Other interesting projects

icns2png. Swift script converting .icns to .png of various sizes.
Bartinter. Dynamically changes status bar style depending on content behind it.

Thanks for reading The iOS Times.

I love helping developers getting more done, whether by highlighting useful open source libraries, sharing Xcode tips and tricks, or leveraging testing and automation.

So here’s a question for you:

What is your biggest struggle right now with building software?

I read every single email that I receive. Looking forward to hear what you have to say. 😉.

#46 - Money, Shortcuts, and external displays

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Money

This library is a companion for the latest Flight School book: Guide to Swift Numbers. It is by far the neatest currency management library I’ve ever seen.

It has a Money type with required associated Currency. There is a Currency for each ISO 4217 currency code.

You to do math with the currency safely:

let prices: [Money<USD>] = [2.19, 5.39, 20.99, 2.99, 1.99, 1.99, 0.99]
let subtotal = prices.reduce(0.00, +) // "$36.53"
let tax = 0.08 * subtotal // "$2.92"
let total = subtotal + tax // "$39.45"

The README goes into details of how to use this library to formatting monetary amounts, support multiple currencies, and adding custom currencies.

And in case you need to convert between currencies checkout CurrencyConverter also by Mattt from Flight School.

UserDefaultsStore

This library by Omar Albeik streamlines the process of storing Codable object to UserDefaults.

The only requirement is to make your objects to the Identifiable protocol, providing a way for them to be retrieved from the store.

struct Laptop: Codable, Identifiable {
    static let idKey = \Laptop.model
    ...
}

let laptopsStore = UserDefaultsStore<Laptop>(uniqueIdentifier: "laptops")!

let macbook = Laptop(model: "A1278", name: "MacBook Pro")

try laptopsStore.save(mackbook)

let laptop = laptopsStore.object(withId: "A1278")

Sharecuts

This is a live example of a website built using Vapor.

You might not be interested in server side Swift just yet, but I’m sure you’ll like the growing collection of iOS 12 shortcuts puts Guilherme Rambo.

Check it out at sharecuts.app.

Lunar.

Lunar by Alin Panaitiu is a macOS app providing “intelligent adaptive brightness” for external displays, and with nice animations too.

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#45 - Validating using RxSwift, CoreML, Jira CLI

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Apple has definitely invested a lot in machine learning in the past years. Both internally to power tech like Siri, and externally with CoreML for developers.

It’s very exciting to see how the open source community has jumped on it. For the 3rd week we have interesting CoreML projects to share 🤖🎉.

MLModelCamera

MLModelCamera is an open source iOS app built by Shuichi Tsutsumi to quickly test trained CoreML models. Simply put the .mlmodel file or files in the /models folder and build on your device.

Quantization

Reza Shirazian with a very deep dive into the new quantization feature introduced in WWDC 2018.

Model size is one of the most common reason for skipping using a local model and opting for an online cloud solution. Fully trained models can go into 100s of MBs and can easily deter potential users from downloading our app. However if you followed WWDC’s What’s new in Core ML session we got a taste of quantization. An approach that can possibly cut down the size of a fully trained model by two third without losing much in accuracy or performance.

RxValidator

A validation library from Geum Sang Yoo built on to for RxSwift providing a easy to read API, and aiming to be flexible and extensible.

Validate.to("There's nothing like spaghetti bolognese 🍝")
    .validate(StringIsShouldNotEmpty())
    .validate(StringIsNotOverflowThen(maxLength: 140))
    .check()

cujira

Taiki Suzuki share a CLI client for world famous Atlassian’s project manager Jira.

Even if you’re not a Jira user you might find this project interesting as an example of how to build a CLI using Swift and Swift Package Manager.

Other interesting projects

YouTube Music for Mac a wrapper app for YouTube Music.
DebugginPerformance an example of using signposts to measure performance.
SeachTextField a UITextField subclass with autocompletion and suggestions list.
HigherKindSwift an experiment to introduce [Higher Kinded Types](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kind_(type_theory) in Swift.

#44 - Create ML, Blockchain, Fast attributed strings

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Programming Language Classifier

Legendary developer and author Mattt has recently come back in the open source scene after working at Apple. His newest project is Flight School a “book series for Swift developers”.

This project is a companion for the article “Training a Text Classifier with Create ML and the Natural Language Framework” showing how to go “from zero to Core ML model in minutes”.

If you find Machine Learning daunting but are curious to get your hands dirty be sure to check it out.

Note: The iOS Times is not sponsored by or affiliated to Flight School.

Blockchain Swift Playground

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cryptocurrencies, have become mainstream buzzwords, with many startups, speculation, and charlatans revolving around them.

What gets less coverage but is way more interesting and powerful is the blockchain technology powering it.

Frederik Riedel shares the Playground that won him a scolarship at this year’s WWDC, showing how to create a blockchain.

Sift

I love open source apps, and I love useful apps. Sift is both. This app by Alex Grinman allows users to Sift track network traffic in real-time for every app, and then create rules to block sites like ads and tracking pages.

StyledTextKit

This library by the makers of GitHawk, the open source GitHub client for iOS, is all about attributed strings.

The problem StyleTextKit aims to solve is that “apps with lots of text embedded in UITableViewCells or UICollectionViewCells, UITextView bring scrolling to a grinding halt”. The library provides a declarative API and promises for fast rendering, providing background-thread sizing, bitmap caching, and custom attribute interaction handling for things like link taps.

Other interesting projects

WhatsNewKit a super customizable framework for building “What’s new” screens.
SwiftEntryKit a banner presenter library with tonnes of stilysh presets.
MessengerKit framework to build Facebook Messenger-like interfaces

#43 - Swift 4.2, Create ML, Siri Shortcuts

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +1000

Last week was the week for Apple developers: WWDC week! Apple revealed a whole range of improvements, new APIs, and tools. The sessions are available here. There’s something for everyone.

It took little to no time to the open source community to ship libraries using the new goodies.

What’s new in Swift 4.2

Ole Begemann is back with a Playground showcasing all the new features introduced in Swift 4.2. A must-run to get up to speed with the changes.

Create ML Playgrounds

Create ML is one of the news of this year’s WWDC. A framework to train machine learning models using Swift and Playgrounds.

GitHub user krishkumar has put together a collection of Playgrounds showing how to train image and movie review sentiment classifiers.

AppCoda have also put togheter an image classifier demo with Create ML.

ShortcutsDemo

Siri Shortcuts are a powerful new feature in iOS 12 that allow your app to expose its functionality to Siri. This enables Siri to suggest your shortcut at relevant times based on various context

Alessio Roberto has put together a demo project showing how to set them up.

Other interesting projects

SSSpinnerButton a collection of buttons with spinner animations to delight your users while waiting for your app to do its thing.
Seaglass open source macOS client for Matrix an open standard for interoperable Instant Messaging and VoIP.

Year 2 Issue 12

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +1100

Bolts-Swift

The Bolts Framework team has started porting Bolts for iOS to Swift. At the moment only the Task component is available, but I’d suggest to keep an eye on the repo for future developments.

PeekPop

A library to make the “Peek and Pop” functionality available only to devices with 3D touch to older ones, and work with it using a transparent API.

SPTPersistentCache

The Spotify team shared their take to the caching problem. SPTPersistenCache is a LRU cache to store NSData with time to live values and semantics for disk management.

It also comes with a super handy companion Mac app GUI tool to inspect the contents of any SPTPersistentCache.

NumberMorphView

This nice view library displays numbers and animates their transitions using tweening.

Sweetcorn

Sweetcorn is an OS X app which implements a node based user interface to create Core Image Shader Language code. The resulting code can be used as the basis for custom Core Image filters for either OS X or iOS.

This app has been developed by Simon Gladman aka @FlexMonkey, that in the past months has been sharing a ton of great resources in the field of image manipulation, and even published a book on the topic. Thanks Simon!

SwiftImageProcessing

An speaking of image processing, this project by Sungcheol Kim, contains a collection of Playgrounds demoing simple and not so simple image processing features in Swift

react-native-ios-charts

This library is a port of iOS-Charts, which is a port of MPAndroidCharts, to React Native. The port is not 100% complete, but there are already a good number of charts available.

SmarkDown

A “pure” Swift markdown implementation. Interesting the choice of the author to only publish the library via SPM.

LeagueofLegends

An iOS App for League of Legends ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Year 2 Issue 11

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +1100

Express

This new web framework developed by Crossroad Labs in inspired by Node.js Express and provide the same simplicity. You can easily define a new endpoint like this:

app.get("/hello") { request in
    // ...
}

In the body of the closure you can do all sorts of computation, and return the result as a JSON content or as an instruction to render HTML, with support out of the box for the Stencil template language.

Have a look at the project’s roadmap and see if you can contribute

NetworkKit

A simple “all-in-one” networking and parsing framework:

NKHTTPRequest.GET(
  "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/11245652.json",
  auth: NKOauth(consumerKey: "consumerKey", consumerSecret: "consumerSecret"),
  params: ["print": "pretty"],
  success: { data in
      var item: NKEItem?
      item <-- data
  },
  failure: { error in
      print(error.message)
  })

I am personally not a fan of tools that do too much for me, but one thing is for sure, once you buy into their way of doing things you can achieve great results with very little code and setup.

This UINavigationController subclass features a visualisation of its navigation stack as a stack of the individual screens, very similar to the iOS app switcher.

Log

A Swift “logging” framework with customizable themes and formatters, and different logging levels.

Log.trace("Called!!!")
Log.debug("Who is self:", self)
Log.info(some, objects, here)
Log.warning(one, two, three, separator: " - ")
Log.error(error, terminator: "😱😱😱\n")

SubtleVolume

This little library allows you replace the built-in volume popup with a more subtle way to display the volume when the user changes it with the volume rocker.

Fuzzer

The project’s README is not very clear about the purpose of this tool, but once you read the companion blogpost everything makes sense.

This tool is meant to help building applications that are robust against unstable web APIs. We’ve all been in a project where the API payload changed on us, without anyone being notified about it, and with the app crashing or misbehaving. Fuzzer provides a way to mutate the dictionaries received from the network and fed to your parsing logic, so that you can write unit tests to validate how robust your app is when the API responses are not what’s expected.

This library is an example of “mutation testing” something I consider very interesting, and wish more team setup in their CIs as nightly jobs.

GoOutside

An Xcode plugin to track how much time you have spent waiting for Xcode to build 😁.

Cichlid

Another Xcode plugin, this one will automatically delete the derived data folder when cleaning, as opposed to manually do it with the “Clean Build Folder” command Shift Alt Cmd K.

GrandCentralBoard

A configurable dashboard app for your Apple TV.

RxPagination A demo project showing a FRP and protocol oriented implementation of networking and pagination
FaceProGame An open source iOS SpriteKit game to “build faces”

Year 2 Issue 10

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +1100

Advance

This framework, originally developed for the Storehouse app, aims to help writing advanced animations and physics-based interaction using a simple API, using CADisplayLink under the hood. The project README clearly states that you should look into Advance only if the animations you are trying to implement are not basic ones.

Advance shines when:

-You are building gesture-based interactions that use physics to reflect the behavior of the real world. -You need to animate custom types with per-frame callbacks.

BTree

Fast ordered collections, implemented using in-memory B-Trees. The project includes implementations of Map<Key, Value>, List<Element>, OrderedSet<Element>, and of course BTree<Key, Payload>. Your application might not require a B-Tree, but I would still recommend you have a look at the project’s README as its well written and goes into the details of B-Trees and their performances.

Tentacle

Tentacle is a GitHub API built using ReactiveCocoa. I suggest you take a look at it as an example of how to wrap a server API using RAC, you’ll be surprised of how simple it is, and how portable the result is.

let client = Client(.DotCom, token: "…")
client
    .releaseForTag("tag-name", inRepository: Repository(owner: "ReactiveCocoa", name: "ReactiveCocoa"))
    .startWithNext { release in
        print("Downloaded release: \(release)")
    }

Other Interesting Projects

SwiftyGestureRecognition A gesture recognizer wrapper to help prototyping in Playground.
TSWeChat A WeChat clone in Swift.
TryParsec Monadic Parser Combinator implementation inspired by the main Haskell parsing libraries.