Swift Around the Web
Colin Eberhard did a great analysis of Swift Adoption Statistics based on Github and StackOverflow contributions. The conclusion is that Swift Adoption is about 30% among Objective-C developers at this point. So if you're doing a talk about Swift, don't assume that everyone has gotten a chance to play around with it just yet!
- Swift Adoption Statistics <Colin Eberhardt>
- Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals In Depth <Alexandros Salazar>
- Instance Methods are Curried Functions in Swift <Ole Begemann>
- Fade In / Out Animations as Class Extensions in Swift <Andrew Bancroft>
- Tuple-wrangling <Airspeed Velocity>
- The Many Forms of Swift Functions <Adoption Curve Dot Net>
- Swift: reverse(), sort() and sorted() explained <sketchyTech>
- Parsing JSON in Swift <Chris Eidhof>
- Swift: Use for-in loops with your own sequence types <sketchyTech>
- The real power of Playgrounds <Martin Lab>
- Swift Operators - A Visual Reference <App Life Balance>
- Re-implementing Optionals using Swift’s powerful enum type. <Jameson Quave>
- Prototyping iOS Animations in Swift <Mathew Sanders>
- Xcode Live Rendering With Nibs Made Easy <MORTEN BØGH>
- iOS 8 Size Classes <Brent Simmons>
Apple News
XCode 6 Beta 5 came out this week! I'm a big fan of the new ?? operator. Here are this week's Apple resources that you should definitely check out if you haven't already:
Other Cool Stuff
During iOSDevCampDC, @borkware shared a note from Apple when Macintosh programming first came out. It was titled "Everything You Know Is Wrong". I can't help but feel like we should apply this logic while learning Swift...
In Case You Missed It
It's crazy how many gotchas come with Swift optionals. This week, I discovered how to unwrap multiple optionals. My favorite thought about optionals comes from a tweet by @Kronusdark.
Tutorials
It's exciting to see the growing number of Swift-only tutorials. Enjoy!
- Flipping Cards with Swift and UIKit <Coding Ricky>
- Replicating Twitter’s bird zoom startup animation (in Swift!) <iOS Development Tips>
- CODEPHENOM: Mastering Swift <YouTube>
- A First Look at Swift and Xcode 6 - An App in Ten Minutes! <FlexMonkey>
- iOS 8 Sprite Kit Flappy Bird Using Swift <Verisage>
- UIDynamics in Swift <Big Nerd Ranch>
- iOS 8 Custom Keyboard Swift Tutorial <Verisage>
- Building a Snapchat-like Container View Controller with Swift <Brendan Lee>
- Progress View Tutorial in iOS8 with Swift <iOScreator>
- Recreating Skype's Action Sheet Animation <Arkadiusz Holko>
Swift Code
It didn't take long for Mattt Thompson, the creator of AFNetworking, to come out with Alamofire - the new elegant networking library in Swift. AFNetworking will of course continue to be supported, but those of us who are bold enough (or have a small enough side project) can get a head start with Alamofire...
Swift Thoughts
As more and more amazing and necessary Swift-only libraries come out and I attempt to work on Swift-first projects, I find myself constantly checking whether CocoaPods has added Swift support yet. Cocoapods is such as big part of my iOS developer workflow, that I can’t imagine NOT having libraries I want to use supported!
Well, last week, I was lucky to meet Eloy Duran, the creator of CocoaPods, at iOSDevCampDC. I learned that the reason CocoaPods does not support Swift yet is because you can’t make a static library in Swift. That might be because Apple wants us to use frameworks moving forward. This means that CocoaPods would have to be significantly modified to support frameworks in addition to the Objective-C static libraries.
There is currently a discussion among the CocoaPods contributors about how to best handle this transition. Eloy recommended submitting a pull request for your specific use-case to get the project and discussion moving in a more practical hands-on direction!
With that, here is this weeks exciting Swift happenings…