I’m seeing a surprising amount of vitriol aimed at Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and Mac development. I understand that there can be reasoned debate around the features (or lack thereof), syntax and even the necessity of it but there can be little doubt about the outcome: if you want to consider yourself an iOS developer, it’s a language that you will need to learn.
The only variable I can think of is when you learn it.
Swift is a new programming language designed by Apple for development on OS X and iOS. I thought that I should try to learn it a little so I decided to convert a non-trivial collection of classes from one of my apps (www.cut) into Swift. I always find it better to work on a real project rather than just to play around with things aimlessly. Also, by re-working an old project, I knew that all the problems I would find would be language related rather than anything to do with the architecture.
I’ve been pretty quiet here for a couple of of weeks and that’s because… well, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Junior took his sweet time popping out — we were in the hospital over a day before he made his grand appearance — but for Juniorette we weren’t sure we’d make it there in time! In the end we checked into the delivery suite just after ten in the evening and the birth was recorded just before eleven.
My first project out of university was a disaster.
The client was unhappy, technically it was a mess, no one knew what it was supposed to do despite the volume of requirements and functional specification documents and the quality of what was there was terrible. People were working hard but it wasn’t really going anywhere.
All of this, I should note, was happening before I joined. I didn’t realise how bad it really was at the time. The Real World was so different and new from university that I was blinded the problems and just did what I thought was best.
I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking. In about 2005 I bought an iSight, Apple’s relatively short-lived external webcam. It was a beautiful device. Sleek, easy to use and functional.
At least, I think it was functional.
For a device that cost me well over £100 I didn’t really think it through. No one else I knew at the time had a Mac with iChat. Or a webcam.
Before I finally gave in and sold it on eBay I did use it a few times with my then girlfriend (now wife). And it was really nice; like the future. Having grown up with old, slow computers the idea of playing video on them is still slightly magical to me. To have a computer simultaneously record, compress, transmit, receive, decode and display high resolution videos still strikes me as pretty amazing.
What a difference two years makes. Just a little over twenty-four months ago we were awaiting the arrival of our son. To commemorate the occasion we went to the park and took a few pictures. The bump, after all, would be short lived.
Since then we’ve spent a lot of time in the playground where these pictures were taken.
The flood of new so-called smart watches continues. Some people seem to love theirs, others remain to be convinced.
Count me in with the unconvinced, though only because the current ones seem to be poorly conceived.
Portability is critical to modern device usefulness, and there are only two classes that matter anymore: always with you, and not… Smartphones dominate always with you.
I think this gets to the heart of why the current range of devices — both those for sale and also those just announced at CES — just are not very compelling.
Last night I did a short presentation about my WSLHTMLEntities open source project at the London iOS Developer Group meeting. You can see the slides here:
One question I got at the end that I was unable to answer is how well it performs compared to other solutions.
As happy as I am with the way that my new app, CameraGPS, a GPS logger application for people who want to geotag their photographs, came out I can’t say that it’s exactly as I envisioned it at the start of the process.
The idea was something like this: many of the GPS logger apps in the App Store require you to either use iTunes file sharing (who connects their iPhone’s to iTunes any more?) or mail yourself the exported document or sign up to some third party fitness or trekking website. Mailing yourself stuff just didn’t feel very slick and I didn’t want to record my trails for fitness purposes.
This took me a while to figure out so I thought it was worth blogging about. The short version: I’m using Core Data with iCloud syncing and it works… mostly. When starting up for the first time — when there is already data in iCloud — none of the data appears in a table view, but restarting the app correctly displays it.
I know what you’re thinking: you’re not merging the updates into the right managed object context. Nope. Sorry. Thinking that was the problem is probably why it took me quite so long to track the real problem down!