Apple Swift Training

History of Apple Mobile Development

• Apple introduced the SDK (System Development Kit) for iOS mobile development in 2008.
• iOS Operating System for iPhone, iPod, and iPad was also introduced.
• SDK is designed to assist developers with creating mobile apps for iOS devices.
• Objective-C was the original development language.
• In 2014 Swift was released by Apple as the preferred programming language for iOS mobile development.

Purpose of Mobile Development

• Permits developers to write apps for mobile devices such as iPhone and iPad.
• Provides developers with a powerful, straightforward-to-use computer language.
• Furnishes developers with Xcode, an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that expedites app development.

Sample Uses of iOS Apps

• Business apps based on current web applications.
• Navigation and MapKit.
• Games.
• And many other applications for business and personal use.

Swift Difficulty Level

• High-level programming language.
• Similar to Ruby, Python, and Objective-C.
• Swift is human readable.
• Swift procedural statements are similar to Python and Objective-C.
• Other major companies like IBM are interested in Swift.

Learning Swift

• Experienced programmers can get up to speed with the basic syntax.
• Great language for object-oriented programming.
• Comprehensive API documentation: https://developer.apple.com/reference/swift
• New learners should learn Swift 3.

Swift: The Good

• Relatively straightforward to learn.
• Recommended language for iOS development.
• Excellent Swift API documentation.
• Great Apple support.

Swift: The Bad

• Currently Swift is a single-purpose language.
• Object-oriented programming style in Swift can be challenging to learn.

Swift: The Future

• Use of Swift continues to grow.
• Preferred language for iOS mobile app development.
• Swift's similarities to other popular languages will promote Swift development.
• Xcode is upgraded regularly to improve the development experience.

Syntax

• Statements and optional semicolons.
• Curly brackets denote scope.
• Case sensitive.
• By convention:
  1. Lowercase variables and method names.
  2. UpperCamelCase class names.

Declaring Variables

var foo = "Hello, world"
var fooBar : Double

Declaring Constants

let foo = "Hello, world"
let bar = 5
let fooBar : Float = 20.16

Comments

//Single-line comments follow 2 forward slashes

/*
This is a 
multi-line comment.
*/

Common Data Types: Strings and Characters

let a = "foo"

var b = "b"

Common Data Types: Integers and Floats

var year = 2017

let weight = 4.9

var stellarDistance : Double

Common Data Types: Booleans

var cool = true

let dead = false

Common Data Types: Arrays

var fruit = ["apple", "plum", "pear"]

Conditions

if someThing or otherThing {
    runFast()
}
else if thisThing and thatThing {
    walkSlow()
}
else {
    eatTurkey()
}

Loops

while i < 5 {    	print("Current value of i: \(i)")	i += 1}

for grade in grades {    print(grade)}

Functions

func say(_ word : String, n : Int){    	for _ in 1...n {       	print(word)	}}
say("Hello", n: 5) // say hello five times

Keep Learning Apple Development

By taking a Webucator Apple Class

"I was looking for insight in moving from Objective C to Swift and this class provided just that."