This Week in Mobile: Android KTX and Being Lazy in Swift

The big news of the week for mobile developers has been around Android KTX. We’ve got that covered here, with a lot more, too! 

iOS 

Using Lazy to Delay Computation explains how you can go further than using lazy for property initialization, and instead use it for computation in functional programming. 

Learn how to use Moya, a network abstraction library, in this excellent tutorial. 

This collection of Design Patterns in Swift is a great reference for any iOS developer to have on your bookmark list.

Apple released Transporter last week, a command line tool to upload app previews to iTunes Connect. 

Protecting API keys should be foremost in your mind when adding your project to source control. Keeping Secrets Out of Git in Your iOS App will help you sleep at night!

Some projects to check out: 

• promises: A modern framework that provides a synchronization construct for Swift and Objective-C, from Google.
• BitcoinKit: Bitcoin protocol toolkit for Swift.
• Restofire: Protocol oriented network abstraction layer build on top of Alamofire to use services in a declarative way. 
• Pure: Pure DI in Swift. 

Android 

The preview of Android KTX: Even Sweeter Kotlin Development for Android looks like it makes Kotlin even more concise. It's still in the very early days, but worth a look if only to see the way that things are going. Joe Birch gives a nice introduction to it in Exploring KTX for Android.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into the game of developing plugins for Android Studio, here’s how to get started.

Basic Android Encryption Do’s and Don’ts has a few really quick tips that you really need to know, and some things that are just nice to know (and will make you sound like an expert!).

Rather than using a plain old list, you want to make things look slick right? Then check out RecyclerView Animations - Add & Remove Items.

Covering both Android and iOS, TensorFlow on Mobile shows how you can get started with some machine learning in your apps. 

Some projects to check out: 

• Android-Goldfinger: Android library to simplify fingerprint authentication.
• PhotoEditor: A Photo Editor library with simple, easy support for image editing using paints, text, emoji and Sticker-like stories. 

General 

Heuristic Analysis for UX: How To Run a Usability Evaluation is a great introduction to the importance of heuristics and how to create an app your users will love.