Apple held their Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for 2014 on June 2 at Moscone West in San Francisco, which was the same venue as previous years. They announced a slew of new APIs, technologies for games such as Metal, new operating systems for iOS (iOS 8) and Mac (Yosemite), and the most important announcement for iOS developers in 2014, that is, the announcement of Swift, a new programming language, which some say is meant to replace Objective-C, as Objective-C was introduced in 1983 and is showing its age due to its long history. Swift is meant to be an easy and simple to learn programming language that will lower the barrier to entry for developers who are intimidated by Objective-C. However, what is Swift and what is good about it? How far does it differ from Objective-C, and finally, how easy is it to learn Swift? These are the questions that we will cover in this chapter, and to start things off, here is a list of topics we will cover:
Welcome...