Book Image

Learning Xcode 8

By : Jak Tiano
Book Image

Learning Xcode 8

By: Jak Tiano

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a breakthrough in mobile computing and the birth of world-changing mobile apps. With a reputation as one of the most user-centric and developer-friendly platforms, iOS is the best place to launch your next great app idea. As the official tool to create iOS applications, Xcode is chock full of features aimed at making a developer’s job easier, faster, and more fun. This book will take you from complete novice to a published app developer, and covers every step in between. You’ll learn the basics of iOS application development by taking a guided tour through the Xcode software and Swift programming language, before putting that knowledge to use by building your first app called “Snippets.” Over the course of the book, you will continue to explore the many facets of iOS development in Xcode by adding new features to your app, integrating gestures and sensors, and even creating an Apple Watch companion app. You’ll also learn how to use the debugging tools, write unit tests, and optimize and distribute your app. By the time you make it to the end of this book, you will have successfully built and published your first iOS application.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Learning Xcode 8
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Introduction to Swift 3

For a long time, developing applications on an Apple platform meant you had to know how to use Objective-C. It is a quirky language, but it has adapted over the years to be a powerful tool for application development and was tied to the core of the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks.

As everyone knows by now, Apple changed the game in 2014 when they introduced Swift, an entirely new and modern language meant to carry app development into the next few decades.

Looking back, it's easy to see why a new language was necessary. Swift cleaned up a lot of long-standing problems with Objective-C, and has enabled Apple to really blow open their development platforms. Since Swift launched in 2014, we've seen a huge addition of functionality to iOS, and two entirely new development platforms with watchOS and tvOS. It is clear: Swift is here to stay.

In this chapter, we'll be getting through as many of the big, important features of Swift as we can. The goal is to get you...