“Following the release of its initial introduction manual for the new programming language,” Arron Hirst reports for RazorianFly, “Apple has released a second FREE book on the iBookstore [sic iBooks Store] that is dedicated to giving those interested in learning more about how to code using Swift.”
Hirst reports, “The new book, entitled Using Swift with Cocoa and Objective-C, is described by Apple as carrying both an overview of a Swift Xcode project, alongside detailing design patterns and best practices for working with Cocoa, Objective-C, and C.”
Full article here.
It was originally given to developers as a PDF on the dev site. But it’s nice Apple make it available to all public.
Were Pages/Numbers/Keynote rewritten in Swift? Maybe that’s what the big ‘loss of features update’ last year was all about. :O
Some of iWork may be in Swift. But that would have nothing-at-all to do with the features dropped. There’s no reason to be confined by Swift, if you run into confinements. The point of the book noted here is that you can mix all three together as needed. They all compile together into the final application.
I.E. the feature loss remains an unfortunate mystery.
Sometimes you have to completely start over from scratch and that means throwing away everything that was done before.
Mystery solved!
If Apple has been rebuilding the source code, tossing out the crap code objects that have been holding iWork back, I’d say that’s preferable to sticking with bad old code objects. Typically the inertia of bad old code is enormous. I can’t complain if the current state of iWork means a better future.
Swift was a well guarded secret until WWDC, there is no way they would have used it in any public codebase. The “loss of features” was necessary to rewrite all of iWork from the ground up and make them work across platforms. The old iWork never stopped working and in the mean time, the new one has most of the features back in, and it works seamlessly across IOS, desktop and web.
The loss of features was due to basically starting from scratch and launching for the web platform. They are trying to have feature parity across three platforms – Mac, iOS and web. I think this launch was premature. I have been sending Apple feedback telling them to add back support for linked text boxes for several months, because that’s the one missing feature that I’ve been in need of, so I’m still using the older Pages.
If you never needed linked text boxes, you wouldn’t miss them. For those of us who do need them–essentially everyone who used Pages for page layout as the earlier versions were targeted to do–the new version is still completely unusable.
Pointing out that Apple has restored other dropped features and enhanced cross-platform compatibility is sort of beside the point for us former page layout users. We might be equally upset if somebody replaced our station wagon with a sports car… Lots of fun but unsuitable for our purpose.
You don’t have any clue what an executable is written in unless the developer told you. Or, you reverse engineered it. The language it is written in makes no difference to the performance of the executable as long as the libraries support it.
Determining what language a particular piece of software is written in is not that hard for a hacker with enough motivation. But hackers are more interested in other stuff.
I would be surprised if current Apple software (Mavericks, Final Cut, iWork, etc.) does not already contain some Swift code. I don’t see why Apple would keep from using it if it offers so many advantages.
Please someone explain.
It was reported that the WWDC iOS app was the first released app to be written entirely in Swift.
There were only a few select developers working on Swift. Programming pieces of Apple’s other apps would expose Swift to too many eyes and risk uncovering the secret.
Between now and the end of the beta period I expect a huge amount of training within Apple and a lot of apps getting an overhaul. Certainly any new code being written will use Swift where applicable.
I’ll wait for the movie.
Just found a new training for Swift. It starts from the most basic concepts and then dives deeper into object-oriented programming (without the load of C as Apple says), then interfacing with Cocoa and practical app samples.
New training for Swift. It starts from the most basic concepts and then dives deeper into object-oriented programming (without the load of C as Apple says), then interfacing with Cocoa and practical app samples.
http://www.udemy.com/swiftdeveloper