As an iOS / Swift mentor for Thinkful.com, every week I give my students a list of resources as a follow up to our mentoring session.  This week’s resources cover details of dealing with data loaded from the Internet, storing data locally (core data and alternatives to core data), and cloud services.  Finally we wrap up with some photoshop tips to automatically create 1X, 2X, and 3X assets for your iOS projects.

loading data asynchronously, delegation, etc

Using NSURLProtocol with Swift

NSNotificationCenter

useful for example, to listen for a notification that your JSON request has loaded, and then act on that at that time.  You can have multiple classes listen for a given notification…

• Apple Docs
• Intro blog post

Core Data and Alternatives (Realm, FMDB)

Discussions / Overview

Core Data

• Core Data w/Saul Mora (who is author of Magical Record, which makes using Core Data much easier)
• http://www.raywenderlich.com/86269/core-data-saul-mora-podcast-s02-e02
• Magical Record

Realm

• Realm with JP Simard
• http://www.raywenderlich.com/86372/realm-jp-simard-podcast-s02-e03

FMDB – to get to the metal of the SQLite database without the overhead of core data

• FMDB with Gus Mueller
• http://www.raywenderlich.com/88558/fmdb-gus-mueller-podcast-s02-e05

Core Data Tutorials

• Core Data By Tutorials (book)
• Core Data Book – download of source code 
• Your First Core Data App Using Swift
• Introduction to Realm

Design Patterns

• Intro to Object-Oriented Design in Swift: Part 1/2
• Intro to Object-Oriented Design in Swift: Part 2/2
• Apple Docs on MVC

Cloud Services

iCloud / Cloud Kit

• https://developer.apple.com/icloud/index.html
• http://www.raywenderlich.com/83116/beginning-cloudkit-tutorial

Parse (facebook cloud services), Graph (facebook login)

• https://developers.facebook.com/products/login/
• https://developers.facebook.com/products/parse/

Dropbox

• https://www.dropbox.com/developers

 Reactive Cocoa, Functional Programming, Eidolon

Insight and full source code access to a production Swift App

Design

Photoshop Generator

You can use the built-in generator plug-in for Photoshop to automatically export appropriately named 1X, 2X, and 3X assets from your PSDs.   Ask me to demo this for you during class if you like.

• Introducing Adobe Generator for Photoshop CC 
• Photoshop Help | Generate image assets from layers 
• Xcode – Asset Catalogs

Free iOS 8 UI Design Kit from UXPin

Michael Flarup’s newest PS template – the iPhone Screenshot template