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

Introduction to SceneKit


Before diving into the development of the game, let's introduce SceneKit briefly.

What is SceneKit?

SceneKit is a rendering engine that's based on a hierarchy of nodes, a similar way to SpriteKit. The most important kinds of nodes are lights, the camera, geometry objects, boxes, spheres, and so on. Actually, all of these are attributes of a node, but for the sake of simplicity in the way we look at them, let's consider these as different entities.

To these nodes, we can apply several actions, such as moving, rotating, and so on. We can also add a physical body to a node and put it into a physical world, which is again really similar to SpriteKit.

Building an empty scene

To get our feet wet, we'll use the playground again as we did in the Chapter 1, Welcome to the World of Swift.

Let's start by creating a new iOS playground called SceneKitPlayground, and import the frameworks needed to perform our experiment:

import UIKit
import SceneKit
import XCPlayground

The latter is...