Hi!

Just watching the WWDC, and Apple has a new app coming out that will allow students to learn Swift on the iPad. They've solved the keyboard issue as well - now you have direct access to code important keys.

Stefan

I was recently speaking with some teachers who were interested in teaching app development with Swift. There was one problem though, all they had were iPads!

Mogenerator is a popular tool for generating objects that represent Entities in a Core Data backend. Unfortunately it has some issues with the Swift 1.2. 

Just to let you know that I am still around, just found myself super busy with work. But ... now that the new version of xcode is out, and Swift itself is now a stable language - I do have a kids Swift course in my sights.

First, I must apologies for the lack of content on this site. When Swift was first released in beta, I got all excited and launched this site and started playing with the language. But then the changes to Swift came, and I figured it made sense to wait for things to settle.

Hi,

I've decided to wait for the final release of Swift before writing any significant articles on the subject. Sorry!

.. There is no point now:

For example, with the latest version of Swift beta 3, the arrays and dictionaries syntax has been redesigned: You now declare arrays as [Int] instead of as Int[], as shorthand for Array<Int>.

So which OS should you create apps for? At first glance, given how many more users are using Android devices vs iOS devices you'd think that Android is the way to go ... but perhaps that might not be the best choice!

Facts about Android

I love bullet points, so here we go:

1. Android has a huge user base but Android OS is heavily fragmented. Who knows how many versions of Android you will have to account for with your app.
2. There are many different Android devices with many different specs. Some problem as in point #1.
3. Android apps are written with Java ... not the hardest but not the easiest language.
4. Android dev tools I hear suck.

If you are going to write Swift code, you are going to use Apple's development environment - Xcode. 

The Xcode 6 IDE provides everything you need to write Swift code. One of these built in tools (that comes with Xcode) is the interactive Playground feature, that lets you see your code working in real time. 

Apple's new programming language Swift, might be the perfect language to teach kids code and basic programming concepts. Here are the reasons why:

• Swift was designed to be easy to learn
• Swift is used to create apps for iOS - kids are motivated to create apps for their phones and iPads!
• Though Swift programming is code based, it is still very visual because you spend a lot of time working with user interface (UI) elements for iPhones and iPads. 
• You program your Swift code with Apple's xCode 6 development software and it comes with Playground. Playground is a live interactive part of xCode 6 that allows you to see the effects of your code in real-time. Even animations and game dynamics can be instantly seen as you write code! It's pretty fun.