Nothing Was Delivered

Editors note: This will be nerdy

I haven’t written about iOS development in several months. I haven’t given up, I just hadn’t had much to say. I was still soaking it in. 

I was reading two separate books, while occasionally going down rabbit holes to understand a topic a little better, and even watching some videos (specifically the much touted CS 193P). I even whipped up a few rough test apps just to prove to myself that I could get something running, even if it didn’t do much.

Then a little while ago I received an email from Apple saying it was time to renew my yearly developers membership. So I had been working on this for a year without much to show for it. So I decided I wanted to start something. Even if it’s terrible, even if I end up trashing it and starting from scratch later, this seems like a good time to take a first concrete steps.

That was my first impulsive decision. The second was, upon firing up Xcode, choosing Swift as the language for my new project.

Even though most of what I had learned so far had been Objective-C, which I have really enjoyed writing, I thought back to my initial feelings after WWDC last year. Swift was my chance to get in on the ground floor of something. 

What made me confident enough to do this the fact that I now had a basic understanding of Objective-C. This is important because Cocoa makes a lot more sense if understand that it was created hand in hand with Objective C. You can still use the Cocoa APIs from Swift, but it still feels like there’s a layer of translation happening. You end up with some weird syntax and excessive casting that only makes sense when you understand that these APIs were designed for an entirely different language.

That said, what have I got to lose, at this point? This is the future, right? And WWDC made clear that Apple was still full speed ahead on Swift.

So I jumped in and started playing around. It had been a while since I read Apple’s The Swift Language, so there was a period of adjustment in getting used to the syntax. Swift is a very programmer-y language. It was built buy compiler guys, so “fast” was as important as “easy” or “intuitive”. 

But after playing around for the last couple of months, I’m feeling comfortable with it. The pace of change has slowed down, and I’m finding myself able to work for longer and longer stretches without having to look up something basic. And Playgrounds have been really helpful. Sometimes you just can’t remember if arrays are passed by value or reference, but it’s easy enough to test in 10 lines of code on a Playground. 

There have been stumbling blocks. I watched Apple’s session on Protocol Oriented Programming, and got so excited I went into my project and made all my model layers structs that conformed to a specific protocol. That did not work out so well, but that story is for another blog post (and if you want a more informed opinion, go back and read Brent Simmons’s Swift Diary). But in general when I sit down I make head way.

So I’m still working. In fact, I’ve got a couple ideas now. It’s all starting to feel manageable. Which, if experience tells me anything, means I’m only a couple of weeks from once again realizing I have no idea what I’m doing.