Swift and Xcode 6
Late last week Apple released Xcode 6 to the general public. I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to try out Swift, so I started working on an idea I’ve had.
General Thoughts
This is probably a general iOS development comment, but the way you link items on the storyboard to class members seems odd to me (having done a lot of C# development in the past). However, it does have its advantages. Counter to the Microsoft environment, it does seem to encourage better design and discourage the worse of some bad habits.
Compared to Android
Its been awhile since I worked with Android, but when I did developing for the platform was disastrous. Setup of the environment (Eclipse) and the emulator was time-consuming and not so straight-forward. With Xcode, its all on rails. You can have a “Hello World” app up in the simulator in 2 minutes.
Problems
The language does seem to be a little wordy at first glance maybe that opinion will get better as I get more experience with it. While the official Apple documentation is now complete with Swift equivalents to Objective-C, examples both official and third party are pretty few and far between it seems.
To be continued…
