Robleh Jama has been using Medium to share press kits for apps:

When you put everything a blogger needs for their article in one spot, they’re going to like that. They’re going to appreciate you because you didn’t just do what’s most convenient for you. You actually thought about them. And even if they don’t write about you now, it starts the relationships on the right foot.

We kept it as unlisted because we figured that it’d be best for bloggers and journalists to get the details first, before passing it along to their audiences. Unlisted posts on Medium are visible to only those who have the link. It won’t be listed on Medium’s public pages or your profile. You can choose to keep it as a draft, or publish the post as an Unlisted post, like we did, or a public post.

I agree with this. I’ve been sent a few Medium-hosted press releases over the past few months – most recently, one for Pigment – and the experience was better than having to download a bunch of PDFs and folders full of screenshots. Perhaps Dropbox could leverage the convenience of easily editable/linkable documents with Paper (imagine if you could combine text and media stored somewhere else in your Dropbox within a single shared document).

Side note: if you’re looking for something a bit more customizable and advanced, I can’t recommend presskit() enough.

Curtis Herbert has some wisdom for indie developers running a business:

What happens when the developer, designer, and the “evil” business/marketing person are all one in the same? You get a blog post out of it! Welcome to my inner struggles with Slopes as I’ve tried to turn it into a serious business.

Over the last few months I’ve learned that there is a need to compromise on some of my ideals. Well, compromise might not be the right word. I think some of the things that we think compromise our ideals actually don’t, when done right. I think as a designer / developer I was too quick to dismiss things I needed to implement to help my business be healthy just because of some preconceived “Apple would never do this” notion.

I would say that this applies to a lot of creative endeavors online. Many of us are fixated on ideals of elegance and perfectionism that aren’t healthy for the business, which ultimately results in failure to monetize and survive. A great product doesn’t sell by itself.

Hi, I’m John Petitto, one of IBM’s Swift developers located at IBM’s Mobile Innovation Lab in Austin. We love Swift here and thought you would too so we are making our IBM Swift Sandbox available to developers on developerWorks.

The IBM Swift Sandbox is an interactive website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment – on top of Linux! Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for you to use.

Neat idea by IBM to write and execute Swift code in any desktop web browser. Too bad the web app is barely usable in iOS Safari because of text selection issues. I’d love to have something like this as a native iOS app eventually (if Apple allows it; but if they allow Pythonista, why not a Swift interpreter now that the language is open source?).

Writing for Ars Technica, Andrew Cunningham interviewed Craig Federighi on Swift going open source and how Apple is approaching open development:

The Swift team will be developing completely in the open on GitHub,” Federighi told Ars. “As they’re working day-to-day and making modifications to the language, including their work on Swift 3.0, all of that is going to be happening out in the open on GitHub.”

So instead of getting a big Swift 3.0 info dump at WWDC 2016 in the summer and then digging into the Xcode betas and adapting, developers can already find an “evolution document” on the Swift site that maps out where the language is headed in its next major version.

As promised earlier this year, Apple today officially open sourced Swift, its new programming language unveiled at WWDC 2014. The now open source Swift is available on Apple’s GitHub page for everyone to try:

Swift is a high performance systems programming language. It has a clean and modern syntax, and offers seamless access to existing C and Objective-C code and frameworks, and is memory safe (by default).

Although inspired by Objective-C and many other languages, Swift is not itself a C-derived language. As a complete and independent language, Swift packages core features like flow control, data structures, and functions, with high-level constructs like objects, protocols, closures, and generics. Swift embraces modules, eliminating the need for headers and the code duplication they entail.

This is big news for developers who have been looking forward to experimenting with Swift. Interestingly, Apple has also publicly posted a repository to track the ongoing evolution of Swift, which should reach version 2.2 by Spring 2016 and version 3.0 by Fall 2016.

This document describes goals for the Swift language on a per-release basis, usually listing minor releases adding to the currently shipping version and one major release out. Each release will have many smaller features or changes independent of these larger goals, and not all goals are reached for each release.

Clearly, open sourcing Swift has been a massive effort for Apple’s teams, and they’re committing to it.

Sebastian Kreutzberger has posted a plea for developers to consider implementing iCloud authentication in their apps in lieu of traditional emails and passwords. The idea is that iCloud is inherently secure and anonymized, making for a superior solution to login information reused across multiple services.

The “magic” of iCloud authentication lays in its invisibility to the user.

With iCloud an app does not need to ask the user for an email address or a password to be able to uniquely identify who is running the app (and to later spam the user in marketing campaigns).

With the built-in, invisible iCloud authentication every app (developer) automatically can get a secure, globally unique representation of the currently logged-in iCloud user from iOS itself which it then can use to replace email and password as identifiers.

I don’t know if iCloud authentication would work for every web service with an iOS app, but I certainly am annoyed by having to create online accounts for almost every app I try these days. I have relied on iCloud signup for a couple of apps so far, and the experience has been really nice. I would like to see it used more.