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Danger Russ Blog

'Swift is sweet - Workflow and tools that pleasantly surprised me'

###TL;DR:

Vim in Xcode via XVim is crucial.

Alactraz is the essential Xcode plugin manager.

Some sweet libs you might like:

  • Bond is an interesting data-binding framework for Swift.
  • Alamofire is an awesome abstraction for all your HTTP.
  • SwiftyJSON because of course you’re using JSON.

NSHipster, objc.io, RayWenderlich are my most-used iOS learning resources.

Have you swifted lately? Swift 1.2 is officially out, which is good news: compiling is faster and more consistent, and we all know Xcode could crash less often.

I recently got back to building apps in iOS after a few years in browser-land, and was pleasantly surprised to find a number of tools that made my life easy.

This post is a quick look at a few of them.

##Own your workflow!

Workflow is HUGE. Minimizing the cognitivie overhead of development has a direct impact on the quality of your work. Never settle for good-enough in your workflow

  • you’ll thank yourself for improvements immediately.

###XVim

I’m a Vim addict, and getting back into iOS without it would be a tragedy. Luckily, I don’t have to!

XVim is an awesome, well-maintained plugin that gives you Vim super-powers in Xcode.

You can even write your own .xvimrc! Mine is here.

###Alcatraz

Alcatraz is an awesome plug-in manager for Xcode. It’ll change your life!

Most plugins are fixes for things that should really be in Xcode already.

Some plugins that I like:

##Don’t reinvent all the wheels

CocoaPods is a convenient package manager – and there are definitely useful open-source packages for iOS apps.

###Bond, Swift Bond

Bond is a nice way to bind some data in your app to some fields in your app’s interface. It can dry up quite a bit of code in your view controllers, which means really good things for maintainability.

###Alamofire

The successor to AFNetworking, Alamofire is a bad-ass little networking lib that will make your http usage easy-peasy.

Alamofire.request(.GET, "http://httpbin.org/get", parameters: ["foo": "bar"])
  .response { (request, response, data, error) in
              println(request)
              println(response)
              println(error)
            }

###SwiftyJSON

Swift has great type safety; however, one side-effect of its implementation makes for nasty JSON unwrapping.

Enter SwiftyJSON.

##Resources

It’s a great time to be an iOS dev! Xcode isn’t as bad as I remember it, and Swift is a really nice language to work with.

For more info, my favorite iOS dev related resources: