This Week in Mobile: Swift Best Practices and Keeping Secure

This week we cover some hidden gems in Android O, subtle hidden best practices from Swift developers, and some good ways to store tokens and keys in both your Android and iOS apps.

iOS 

You want to be the best Swift developer in the office, right? Here’s a list of subtle best practices that pro-developers are keeping secret. I’d particularly recommend following tip number 8, around making classes final by default. 

How to Import Large Data Sets Using Core Data compares two approaches to solving the problem, looking at both memory and performance implications. 

Here’s a Guide to Organizing Your iOS Debug, Development and Release States With .xcconfig Files. It’s an excellent way of dealing with API keys and other constants. 

Swift With A Hundred Engineers, recorded at last year’s Swift Summit, talks about Uber’s complete rewrite of their rider app in Swift, and what they learned about Swift, and themselves, along the way. 

Some projects to check out: 

• TestDrive: Quickly try out any Swift pod or framework in a playground. 
• BouncyLayout: A collection view layout that makes your cells bounce. 
• Anima: A chainable layer-based animation library. 

Android 

In Hidden Gems of Android O, Ian Lake gives a concise overview of the changes in the latest version of Android, from the Storage Access Framework to changes in SharedPreferences. If you haven’t had a chance to read up on Android O yet, this is the place to start. 

Learn how the team at Basecamp made their app 100% Kotlin after spending a year with the language. The article is full of great tips to ease yourself into complete Kotlin immersion, without diving in at the deep end. 

One of the great advantages of Firebase is how little coding it requires for you to provide a back end. You can even go as far to use it as a real-time system. Find more about how to get it going here. 

Security can be tricky at the best of times, but when you APK can be reverse engineered, you need to take extra steps to store your tokens securely. Here are some tips on how using the NDK can help. 

Some projects to check out: 

• Matisse: A well designed local image and video selector for Android. 
• Tiny: An image compression framework. 
• debugkit: Ever hidden debug functions in your UI? Here is a clean way to do it. 

General 

Finding time to work on side projects is hard enough, but when you have a family, it’s even tougher. Here’s one developer's thoughts on How to Build a Side Project as a Developer With A Busy Family Life.

Want to host your website a little differently? Check out this illustrated guide to setting up your website using GitHub and Cloudflare. 

And if you’ve lost your job recently, and feeling down, here’s why it could be the best thing for your career!