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Free ebook: The Complete Guide to Understanding Swift Optionals
Introducing a massive 40-page free guide for developers who want to finally stop struggling against optionals. This guide will answer all your questions and also introduce some more advanced optionals techniques. You will finally understand where ! and ? go, what they mean in each context and use them confidently without having the compiler bothering you all the time.
Swift Apprentice
Learn how to program in Swift 2, through a sequence of playgrounds. Start with the basics like types, classes, and optionals and move to advanced topics like protocol oriented programming and generics.
Swift Around the Web
Swift's Break and Continue Statements
@allonsykraken mentioned labelled loops and breaking them in his Hipster Swift try! Swift talk, so I was excited to see more examples in this blog post from @abargh!
Code
Easy Skeezy Date Formatting for Swift and Objective-C
Whoa! Wish this was out three weeks ago when I was working heavily with dates in the try! Swift App! I'll definitely be using this in the future. Thanks @subdigital!!!
VIPER to be or not to be?
It's on my list to explore VIPER architecture for iOS more after I heard about it from an experienced developer who looked at a complex project I was working on last year. I loved this article for simply explaining the different components of the architecture and how they work together.
Apple News
Xcode 7.3 beta 5 Now Available
The one big thing in this release is that Playgrounds now support embedded video! Check out the details from @ericasadun here if you're interested.
Expanding Commit Access
Whoa!! The Swift team is allowing commit access to non-Apple engineers!!!
"Now that the Swift Continuous Integration system is established and proven, weβd like to grant commit access on a more frequent basis to project contributors who have established a track record of good contributions. If you would like commit access, please send an email to the code owners list with a list of 5 non-trivial pull requests that we accepted without modifications."
Congratulations to the 5 Swift community contributors (listed here) who have already received commit access πππ
Design
On chat as interface
I started off by copy / pasting good quotes from this blog post, and ended up pasting the entire blog post... so read it all!
"When we can chat with our personal agent, or our things, itβll seem normal. When we can start a thread with friends who are going to a festival, and their bots join in, offering tips, scheduling, and generally helping out, weβll wonder how we ever did without it."
Random Cool Stuff
Dancing Cube!!!!
The day before try! Swift, a bunch of us watched the sunset from Tokyo's Mori Tower. Little did I know that the top of the tower also had incredible art - this dancing cube made my day!! Such an incredible and unbelievable art sculpture!
Here is another take from @ashfurrow!
Videos
Embrace Immutability, by Keith Smiley
"Parsing inherently heterogeneous data has always been a point of conversation within the Swift community. After nearly 2 years of different approaches to this problem, Keith will look at where we have been and how todayβs Swift language features provide for cleaner and safer solutions to immutable models."
Swift Evolution
Swift Evolution acceptances: The big three
"Today, Apple accepted (with some modifications) three major internally-driven proposals. They are:
- SE-0005 Better Translation of Objective-C APIs Into Swift
- SE-0006 Apply API Guidelines to the Standard Library
- SE-0023 API Design Guidelines
Developed by the core Swift team, all three sculpt the way Swift defines itself as a language and how developers will express Swift conventionally moving forward."
Swift Code
- Express - Swift Express is a simple, yet un-opinionated web application server written in Swift
- Advance - A powerful animation framework for iOS.
- TryParsec - Monadic Parser Combinator for try! Swift
- Cichlid - automatically remove the current project's DerivedData directories
- FolioReaderKit - A Swift ePub reader and parser framework for iOS.
- boom.swift - fun boom effect for your Mac!
Business
Legal Issues for Developers
Important things we don't think about as developers running a business...
Swift Source
Swift Abstract Syntax Tree
Fascinating!
"Swift compiler has an interesting mode:
-dump-astwhich outputs the abstract syntax tree of a swift source code. AST is used to represent the source code in form of a tree containing syntactic information."
Swift Thoughts
My current feelings can be summarized in one beautiful Japanese word: γη²γζ§γ§γ (pronounced Otsukaresama desu). It translates roughly to something like "You look tired" - but from what @gillygize explained to me, instead of being offensive, it means you've given the task everything you've had and are honorably tired as a result.
That is exactly how I feel after very successfully putting on my very first conference ever... in Japan... in two languages... for 500+ attendees ... from multiple countries such as Australia, Ukraine, Italy, Russia, The Netherlands, Lebanon, India, Romania, Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines (26 students flew in just for the conference!) & more!
I'll write more about #tryswiftconf on my blog in the next few days, but it was a completely magical experience to facilitate the creation of a very international Swift community! I cannot be more proud of everyone who organized it (γγγγ¨γγγγγΎγ @k_katsumi, @tasanobu, @cjwirth & everyone else!) , spoke, attended, and helped us all communicate across cultures and languages.
As @jesse_squires so beautifully put it in his try! Swift talk on Contributing to Open Source Swift - Swift is more than a programming language, Swift is a community π€ππ