Book Image

Swift 2 By Example

By : Giordano Scalzo
Book Image

Swift 2 By Example

By: Giordano Scalzo

Overview of this book

Swift is no longer the unripe language it was when launched by Apple at WWDC14, now it’s a powerful and ready-for-production programming language that has empowered most new released apps. Swift is a user-friendly language with a smooth learning curve; it is safe, robust, and really flexible. Swift 2 is more powerful than ever; it introduces new ways to solve old problems, more robust error handling, and a new programming paradigm that favours composition over inheritance. Swift 2 by Example is a fast-paced, practical guide to help you learn how to develop iOS apps using Swift. Through the development of seven different iOS apps and one server app, you’ll find out how to use either the right feature of the language or the right tool to solve a given problem. We begin by introducing you to the latest features of Swift 2, further kick-starting your app development journey by building a guessing game app, followed by a memory game. It doesn’t end there, with a few more apps in store for you: a to-do list, a beautiful weather app, two games: Flappy Swift and Cube Runner, and finally an ecommerce app to top everything off. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to build well-designed apps, effectively use AutoLayout, develop videogames, and build server apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Swift 2 By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Welcome to the World of Swift
2
Building a Guess the Number App
Index

A stage for a bird


Let's kick-start the game by implementing the background, which is not as straightforward as it might sound.

SpriteKit in a nutshell

SpriteKit is a powerful but easy-to-use game framework introduced in iOS 7.

Basically, it provides the infrastructure to move images onto the screen and interact with them.

It also provides a physics engine (based on Box2D), a particles engine, and basic sound playback support, making it particularly suitable for casual games.

The content of the game is drawn inside SKView, which is a particular kind of UIView, so it can be placed inside a normal hierarchy of UIViews.

The content of the game is organized into scenes, represented by subclasses of SKScene. Different parts of the game, such as the menu, levels, and so on, must be implemented in different SKScene classes. You can consider an SK in SpriteKit as an equivalent of UIViewController.

Inside SKScene, the elements of the game are grouped in the SKNode's tree, which tells SKScene how to render...