iOS -Swift Basics

The Basics

Swift does away with the standard of declaring variables by starting with their type names, and instead opts to use a Javascript-like ‘var’ keyword to define any variable.

So for instance in Objective-C where you have this:

NSString *myString = @"This is my string.";

You now have this:

var myString = "This is my string."

Meanwhile constants are expressed with the ‘let’ keyword

let kSomeConstant = 40

In this case kSomeConstant is implicitly defined as an integer. If you want to be more specific you can specify which type it is like so:

let kSomeConstant: Int = 40

With both arrays and dictionaries, they are described using brackets []

var colorsArray = ["Blue", "Red", "Green", "Yellow"]
var colorsDictionary = ["PrimaryColor":"Green", "SecondaryColor":"Red"]

Apple talks iOS 8

Quick Reply: iOS 8 features the ability to quickly respond to messages from Notification Center as well as the lock screen

Favorite Contacts in Multitasking: Favorite contacts are now available in the multitasking view

Safari for iPad has new tabs view: The same tabs view from Safari on iPhone is now available on iPad as well as OS X Yosemite’s sidebar

Quick reply for third party apps: This includes apps like Facebook

Mail gestures and management improvements: Similar to Mailbox, gesture based actions and deeper integration with Calendar and better multitasking within Mail

Spotlight: Spotlight now has more advanced features on iOS similar to OS X Yosemite including in-line results from Wikipedia and music on iTunes. Spotlight is also built-in to Safari’s search field as an alternative to Google Search

Quicktype: iOS 8 features a keyboard feature called Quicktype which is an alternative keyboard with suggestive typing with context awareness. Typing learning is private to the device so not shared or accessible by others; securely implemented.

Continuity: Same continuity features demoed under Yosemite.

Messages: Support for naming threads and group message management. This includes Do Not Disturb support per thread and the ability to leave the thread. Sharing is also made easier with the iOS 8 version of Messages including attachment management and voice, photo, and video sharing. Location sharing is also made much easier.

Messaging is very similar to Facebook’s Messenger app in terms of sharing photos and videos quickly as well as voice. Audio and video messages are allowed to delete after a period of time to avoid large files clogging up storage similar to Snapchat and other message apps. Audio messages can be heard from the lock screen using a Raise to Hear feature.

iCloud Drive: iCloud Drive allows users to work with documents across applications on iOS 8 using documents stored in iCloud.

Enterprise: iOS 8 includes a new enrollment program making enterprise device usage much easier.

HealthKit & Health: HealthKit is a feature that speaks with fitness and health apps to pull information from various apps into a single app called Health that centralizes results. The software features integration with the Mayo Clinic. It can present weight, activity, heart rate, and more.

Family Sharing: This feature brings together family photo streams, calendars, reminders, Find My Friends, and even shared purchases up to six family members on iTunes, App Store, and iBooks. This is connected by the credit card.

Photos: iCloud now stores all photos including more than what can fit on the device. Photos also includes advanced search features now with perimeters like time, location, and albums.

Photos also now features advanced editing features within the app. Photos and videos are backed up to iCloud at full resolution, but requires iCloud storage space. New pricing and storage tiers will be available.

Shazam: Siri will support Shazam for music recognition in iOS 8 as well as feature a hands-free mode with the Hey Siri command.

Availability: iOS 8 will be available in beta today for developers and publicly this fall.

Apple Launches Swift, A New Programming Language For Writing iOS And OS X Apps

At its WWDC developer event today, Apple surprised all of the developers in the audience by launching a new programming language called Swift. This new language seems to be poised to replace Objective-C as the main programming language on Apple’s platforms.

Swift will use the same LLVM compiler and runtime as Apple’s Objective-C implementation, so Swift and Objective-C code can live side-by-side in the same application. The language provides access to all of the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch features developers are currently used to from Objective-C.

It should feel familiar to those who are already used to Objective-C, Apple says, and is meant to “unify the procedural and object-oriented portions of the language.” It does diverge from Objective-C in more than just the syntax, though; it also features variable types like tuples and optional types. It also includes operators that aren’t found in Objective-C, which allow you to perform remainder operations on floating-point numbers, for example.

Here are some of the highlights of the language according to Apple:

• Closures (similar to blocks in C and Objective-C) unified with function pointers
• Tuples and multiple return values
• Generics
• Fast and concise iteration over a range or collection
• Structs that support methods, extensions, protocols.
• Functional programming patterns, e.g.: map and filter

In addition, Apple notes how the language was designed for safety, with variables that have to be initialized before use, arrays and integers that are checked for overflow and automatic memory management.

Swift support, of course, will be deeply integrated into Apple’s updated Xcode IDE. It will feature an interactive “Playground” that allows you to edit your code and watch how your changes influence your app in real-time. Xcode’s debugging console now also supports Swift syntax natively.

According to Apple, Swift will provide a number of significant speed advantages to developers. A complex object sort, for example, will run 3.9x faster than an implementation of the same algorithm in Python. That’s also faster than Objective-C, which is 2.8x faster than the Python version.

We will obviously need to take a closer look at this new programming language and how it relates to other languages. Apple is making the documentation available today, both as an iBook and on its developer site.

Objective-C was always a hard language to pick up for new developers. We will also have to see if Swift makes getting started with app development on Apple’s platforms easier, but from a first look at the documentation, it definitely feels more accessible than Objective-C.