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Advances in Apple’s Vision Framework: 2019 Year-in-Review

Apple’s Vision framework has come along way in the last few years gaining a number of exciting new features and improvements. 2019 was no exception and in this article, @chughanupam provides a summary of all of 2019’s new features along with links to articles that show many of them in use.
fritz.ai

Code

Compute Image Similarity Using Computer Vision in iOS

I’m always surprised at the sheer amount of power available in Apple’s Vision framework. This article from @chughanupam highlights another such example – a new addition to the framework this year – the ability to determine the similarity of two images. It’s a perfect fit for apps that detecting duplicate images, grouping and searching images or even for analysing a person’s signature to see if it is a forgery.
fritz.ai

Quick Tip: Clearing Your App’s Launch Screen Cache on iOS

A useful tip from @_inside on how to clear your app’s launch screen cache on iOS.
rambo.codes

Code

Implementing a Peel-Off Animation

If you’ve ever played with stickers in iMessages, you might be familiar with the little peel-off animation stickers have when dragging them onto a message. The thing is if you’re looking to implement something like this yourself using CoreAnimation you might start to struggle – the APIs just aren’t there to do this easily. No worries though – Robert Böhnke is here with a clever tutorial showing you how to use SceneKit and SCNGeometryTessellator to create a similar effect.
robb.is

Regexes vs Combinatorial Parsing

@khanlou digs into the world of combinatorial parsers and how to use them as an alternative to more complex (and difficult to understand) Regex patterns. He also provides some useful jumping-off points if you want to investigate combinatorial parsers further.
khanlou.com

On-Device Training with CoreML

One of the big new features in CoreML this year has been the addition of support for on-device model personalisation. Over the past few months, @mhollemans has been putting together a really interesting series of articles (1, 2, 3) covering this new feature and this week he rounds off with a look at how to train a deep neural network and then use transfer learning to customise it on-device.
machinethink.net

Performance Battle: AnyView vs Group

With rumours circulating about potential performance issues when using AnyView in your SwiftUI applications, @nallexn dons his Mythbusters hat to investigate whether there is any substance to these rumours. It’s an interesting read.
github.io

Code

A Smart Feature Flagging System for iOS

An interesting article from @albertodebo which provides insight into how he and his colleagues at @justeat_tech use their open-source framework JustTweak to incorporate feature flags and how these enable them to rapidly experiment and iteration on their app design whilst still staying in control.
just-eat.com

Recreating iMessage Confetti

Polish your Core Animation skills with this in-depth tutorial from @brycepauken that dives into some of the less documented features of CAEmitterLayers to re-create iMessage’s confetti animation.
bryce.co

Catalyst Tutorial: Running iPad Apps on macOS

With the introduction of Catalyst this year, the gap between iOS and macOS is smaller than ever. In this tutorial, @troutdev gets you up to speed with building iPad apps that can run natively on macOS.
raywenderlich.com

Adding Haptic Feedback to Your App with CoreHaptics

Add a new dimension to your app experience with this step-by-step tutorial from @DonnyWals that shows you how to incorporate haptic feedback into your app using Apple’s CoreHaptics framework.
donnywals.com

Getting Started with RealityKit: Collaborative Augmented Reality

@MaxxFrazer continues his tour of Apple’s RealityKit framework with a look at just what it takes to build a collaborative AR experience using RealityKit and Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity frameworks.
medium.com

Build a CoreML Recommender Engine for iOS Using Create ML

If you’re developing a content-driven app and looking to personalise that content based on users preferences then take a look at this tutorial from @chughanupam which shows you how to use CreateML to build your very own recommendation system.
fritz.ai

Code

Debugging with Swift Combine Framework

Due to its functional reactive nature, debugging techniques such as setting breakpoints and examining stack traces often don’t help when debugging your Combine code. Instead, @V8tr explores some different debugging approaches like marble diagrams, generating breakpoints via code and the good old printing to the console.
vadimbulavin.com

Simple Semantic Image Segmentation in an iOS Application – DeepLabV3 Implementation

Interesting article from @omarmhaimdat introducing the concept of Image Segmentation – a vision processing technique for partitioning images into regions in order to extract the different objects within the image. I learnt quite a bit from this one.
fritz.ai

Code

How Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn’t

We’ve heard so much about ABI stability over the last few years and with it finally shipping in Swift 5 you might be wondering what all the fuss was about. This article from @gankra_ goes a long way to explaining and does a good job illustrating the elegance of the solution chosen for Swift. It’s a good read if you’re interested in what is going on under the hood.
github.io

Secret Management on iOS

Another interesting article from @mattt – this time on how to store secrets such as API keys and access tokens on a users device in a secure manner. His conclusion might not be what you expect.
nshipster.com

CoreML and Combine

Really interesting article from @mhollemans looking at how to integrate CoreML into the Combine framework by using CoreML as an operator within a larger reactive event processing chain.
machinethink.net

Sound Classification on iOS Using Core ML 3 and Create ML

CreateML has come a long way over the last couple of years. One of the new features added at WWDC this year was support for on-device sound classification and with Create ML’s new standalone app, adding these features to your own app has never been easier. @chughanupam shows you how.
heartbeat.fritz.ai

SwiftUI Tutorial: Navigation

Once you’ve got the basics of SwiftUI nailed and have wrapped your head around bindings, the natural progression is to look at how to perform basic navigation between two SwiftUI views. If you’re just getting started, @mataharimau has you covered with this step-by-step tutorial showing you how to implement the navigation of a master-detail app.
raywenderlich.com

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Message-ID and Mail.app Deep Linking on iOS and macOS

Whilst recent changes in frameworks like iCloud Keychain, Shared Web Credentials, Password Autofill, Universal Links and Sign in with Apple have gone a long way to minimizing the friction of account creation and authentication, there are still a few cases that aren’t entirely covered by these new features. In this article, @mattt attempts to address one such case – how to do seamless “passwordless” authentication via email on iOS.
nshipster.com

Navigation Bar Customisation

In this two-part series (Part 1, Part 2), @dmtopolog takes a look at some of the different options we have for customising the navigation bar in UIKit and digs into some of the detail of a new option available to us in iOS 13 – UINavigationBarAppearance.
dmtopolog.com

Code

A Complete Guide to In-App Purchases for iOS Development

In-app purchases are a great way to monetise your app but implementing in-app purchase can be a little tricky. This week, @gabtheodor has written an in-depth article to help you get started. It doesn’t cover *every* in-app purchase scenario, choosing to focus on how to implement consumable and non-consumable products but does walk you through things step-by-step so it’s a great place to start to understand some of the basics.
appcoda.com

MetricsKit

Xcode 11 and iOS 13 make it easier than ever to understand how your app is working in the field. In this article, @mattt takes a look at MetricsKit, a new framework in iOS 13, that makes it super-easy to collect and process battery and performance metrics for your app.
nshipster.com

Implementing Multiple Window Support on iPadOS

One of the big new features that arrived along with iPadOS is support for multiple windows – letting you open multiple instances of an application at the same time. This article from @chughanupam gives a good introduction to the new APIs and will also give you a much better understanding of how these changes affect the overall app lifecycle.
medium.com

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Building a Face Detecting Robot with URLSessionWebSocketTask, CoreML, SwiftUI and an Arduino

Fun project from @rockthebruno explores both the new Socket APIs and SwiftUI on iOS 13 by building a face-detecting sentry bot using CoreML and Apple’s Vision Framework. I might be wrong but isn’t this how terminator started?
swiftrocks.com

Time-Limited In-App Purchase

With holiday season approaching for many, @sasmitoadibowo has been exploring some potential options for creating time-limited in-app purchases.
cutecoder.org

Code

SwiftUI Tutorial for Slider Control

SwiftUI lets you create some pretty advanced effects with relatively little code. In this tutorial, Martin Goldin shows you how to create a liquid swipe animation for switching between pages.
exyte.com

Common Cryptographic Operations

If last weeks link about Apple’s new CryptoKit framework piqued your interest, this week @AndyIbanezK has published a slightly more in-depth article showing you how to perform some common cryptographic operations such as hashing, key generation, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, signing and more.
andyibanez.com

Catalytic Converter

Beyond the obvious play on words in this article’s title (yes – I wish I’d thought of that one ), this is a really interesting article from @jamesthomson looking at just what it takes to truly convert an iOS app to macOS using Catalyst.
tla.systems

Dynamic Type in SwiftUI

Dynamic type is an almost essential feature in any modern iOS app. SwiftUI is a great help on this front with built-in support for dynamic type out of the box. Although this is a great start, some work is still required. @mecid shows you how.
github.io