My Swift App – An Ongoing Experiment

Work is progressing on my first iOS app written in Swift.  I think that I might have a rudimentary alpha product ready to start testing in a few weeks.  Based on my experience with it so far, here are some of my thoughts, observations, and concerns.

• Developing in Swift is as the name implies, “Swift.”  I didn’t know anything about Objective-C nor Swift before I started my app and I think I’m making decent progress given the amount if time I’ve had to work on it.  Given proper resources, I believe its possible to progress Swift apps from concept to production in a matter of weeks.
• Language resources (documentation and examples) are still pretty sparse.  Get ready to learn a little Objective-C if you need help with API calls because that is where the majority of the help you will find will be.
• The iOS 8 Simulator doesn’t save location privacy settings,  That means that every time you run an app that requires location privileges, you have to edit the settings again.  Based on what I’ve read, this issue has existed for some time in the beta code.
  This was due to user error.  You have to use either the location manager’s requestWhenInUseAuthorization or requestAlwaysAuthorization functions paired with the right entries in your projects Info.plist file.  The reason mine wasn’t working was I had erroneously edited the plist file associated with the unit tests.

  <key>NSLocationWhenInUseUsageDescription</key>
  <string>Use location when open?</string>
  <key>NSLocationAlwaysUsageDescription</key>
  <string>Use location always?</string>

• Perhaps the biggest issue is that Xcode cannot refactor Swift code.  To me this seems like a giant shortcoming of the editor.  Hopefully Apple will push an update soon to correct this.
• While storyboards are powerful, some of the functionality is not so discoverable.  The auto-layout functionality took me awhile to find and not without searching the net.  I think they maybe onto something, but I do tend to like the way Visual Studio makes similar functionality “findable” from the properties panel.
• As of Xcode 6.0.1 and iOS Simulator 8.0, AVSpeechSynthesizer doesn’t appear to work at all.

  var mySpeechSynthesizer:AVSpeechSynthesizer = AVSpeechSynthesizer()
  var myString:String = "This is a test."
  var mySpeechUtterance:AVSpeechUtterance = AVSpeechUtterance(string:myString)

  When executed in the iOS simulator, the code results in “Speech initialization error: 2147483665”.  I’ve seen a few work arounds on the net, but I don’t believe any of them actually work in Swift.