With every major version release of iOS, Apple ships along a great number of new technologies and frameworks. iOS 8 is going to be released officially pretty soon, and new great stuff awaits both users and developers. This version of iOS brings quite exciting new things, and among them, don’t forget the new programming language named Swift, that Apple presented at the WWDC this summer. So, with this tutorial I would like to welcome you to a series of new posts, in which we are going to work with frameworks introduced in iOS 8, and with improvements made to the existing SDK.
Starting from this tutorial, we are going to develop all the sample applications for the next ones in Swift. Not because it’s a brand new language and it would be cool to get to know it, but mostly because it’s quite possible to become the official language of iOS (and Mac OS) after a while. We have been working with Objective-C for some time, some of us for years, and of course, we don’t mean to forget it. However, as technology evolves, it’s our duty to learn this new language.
Before I start talking about the topic of this tutorial, I would like to make a few observations regarding Swift, since this is the first time I write about it. I am pretty sure that all of you that you are now reading these lines, you have seen the related WWDC session videos, you have downloaded the e-book, and you’ve read a few (or more) things about Swift. Compared to Objective-C, Swift is much simpler from the point of syntax, the code is much clearer and of course, thanks to the nature of Swift, safer. Furthermore, one could say that reminds a combination of other languages. Even though it’s necessary to get used to a new way of writing code and to forget old habits (such as adding the semicolon ; at the end of each command), there are only a few new things you have to learn in Swift (such as optionals, tuples, new way to handle structures, etc.). If it has been easy for you to develop applications in Objective-C, then it’s really easy to write code in Swift too, and you will find this out through this tutorial. Closing this short talk about Swift, I must say that since this language is new, I recommend you to keep the e-book always open for study, and of course… to read the tutorials at Appcoda!