Scribbles

I’ve got a few plans on how I will be picking up the language. The first few steps involve reading the specification and catching up on the videos from the past couple of WWDCs.

However, in the process of checking out some courses on Udacity, I discovered that some of their introductory iOS courses are being taught in Swift.

So I dipped my toes into the Swift waters by creating a relatively simple app as the project for the Intro to iOS App Development with Swift course.

Syntactic Differences

Creating the app was primarily a matter of getting used to the syntactic differences in how Swift uses the Cocoa APIs versus how Objective-C uses them.

The main thing that tripped me up was the use of optionals. I did some reading on them last year, but all of that is pretty fuzzy at this point. So basically, I just mashed the tokens around until Xcode compiled without any warnings.

AVFoundation

One other thing of which the app made use was AVFoundation for recording and playing back audio. That was a bonus for me since I’ve never used it, but have been planning to learn some of the basics for my current “real” app project (i.e. one I am planning to publish to the App Store).

Conclusion

Anyway, that was an unexpected diversion, but it made for a fun couple of nights. I’m looking forward to spending more time working with Swift. The plan is to maybe incorporate a module or two of Swift into my current project. We’ll see how that goes.

Watching this video from WWDC has given me more reasons to start working with Swift. It’s also given me a practical first step into using it on a regular basis.

If I can integrate one module, maybe just a simple one, into an existing app, then, I can move on to bigger things from there.

They are certainly marketing the language with their typical style.

“With new error handling and defer, the Swift temptation is finally beginning.”

– Marco Arment, feeling the same as I.

I’m just trying this out, we’ll see if it sticks.

When Apple announced Swift at WWDC last month, I made a conscious decision to not get caught up in the excitement of a new language. The plan was to focus on getting work done in good old Objective-C for the next few months, then catch up with Swift sometime in the future, when I needed it.

Five and a half weeks later, it looks like I need to change my plan. Based on the volume of blog posts being made about it, Swift is gaining a lot of traction with the community pretty quickly. At the same time, it’s a language that is going through a lot of changes in its infancy. I’m going to spend a couple of hours each week getting caught up with those changes as they occur so that when it’s time to learn it in earnest, I’ll have a better foundation on which to start.

I’ll post every Sunday night to start.