Swift Coding on the Mac and iPad

Learning to do some Swift coding. I got a book from the Apple website which gives a starter into app development with Swift. It’s fairly simple stuff, but it comes with a Playground which can be opened up in Xcode. Within the Xcode there are instructions for what to do to create some simple coding examples. I’m enjoying using the Playground as a way of immediately seeing what happens with the code I’m creating. Within these lessons you write your code after being given some hints and help to get started. Then you have a chance to work it out for yourself. It’s a good way of doing it because you learn more by doing.

Learning by making mistakes

There was a point within these Swift coding lessons I was trying to do something and I’d forgotten something from one of the previous lessons. After a certain amount of head scratching and working things out was able to get past the problem. I was working with strings and I wanted to use a constant I’d already set up previously in the programming. I was trying to do String Interpolation, and I’d forgotten exactly which characters I needed to use to make it happen. This was all about solving a problem within the larger problem which was working out how to do some maths. I was quite pleased with myself when I got to the end of the three lessons and I’m interested in taking it further.

First app: Single photo – Lesson 4

This is the chapter 4 of the book on Swift Coding and I will make an application that displays a photo. This is just a starting point to get a photo showing within an application. The next part of the job will be to get a reaction when the user taps the screen. I can’t wait to get started!

Making something useful with Swift Coding

I’ve been doing some simple coding using the application Editorial. I’ve created a number of coded workflows to get things done quickly as part of my job. I’d like to create the same processes, but within an application of my own making for my iPhone. I’d like to use some computer logic – if this then that – type of scenarios. So if I press one button it takes me to one view allowing me to only enter certain information. This is so I don’t have items on screen I don’t need to look at, making it simpler to use and more efficient. I think the hardest part of this will be to connect this up to a receptacle for storing the information collected. With what I done so far as been easy because it’s part of a text based application. It’s going to be more difficult if I need to set up a database, add data to it and maintain what is collected. The other part of that work will be to have ways to display the data. I will need to look at data and get meaning from it at a later stage.

A problem to be solved – Swift Coding iPad

I’m hoping I can think of a few other things needing solutions. Solutions to be worked out and implemented by use of coding. Maybe if I need to, I can look at one or two applications I use already and find better ways or more personalised solutions to what the app already provides.

Swift coding much better than Objective-C

I tried learning to program before and it was Objective-C-based coding. It seemed complicated and difficult to implement. I just had a hard job of getting my head around how it operated. I have only just started with using Swift, but with it being such a new language it seems more organised and much easier to use.

I’m really looking forward to the Playground application available for the iPad when it becomes available later in the year. It seems I will do some proper coding on the iPad at long last. There are other applications such as Pythonista and Coda for writing code. Coda seems to be mainly for writing HTML for websites. I have just looked at the website for Panic Software who make this application to see what else it can do. It has syntax modes for a large variety of computer languages. It will do Swift as well as Python, Ruby, JavaScript and Markdown and a whole lot of others. I can see all have to spend some time with this application and see what I can do with it.