The most significant change to Apple’s developer ecosystem this decade has been the introduction of the Swift programming language – and we’ll probably see the next big change come during this year’s WWDC with the introduction of third party UIKit apps on the Mac.
As for Swift, the new language was announced at WWDC 2014. With contributions from both Apple engineers and the open-source community, it has seen constant updates and is now in version 4.2.1.
An important aspect of Swift that has been affecting users since its first version is that its application binary interface, or ABI, is not stable. What that means in practice is that Apple can’t include the Swift language support in its operating systems, because an app written with Swift 3 won’t work with the language support binaries for Swift 4. The solution to that is to include the Swift language libraries inside the app bundle that gets downloaded from the App Store, increasing the bandwidth and storage required by the app.
Telegram is out today with a big iOS update. The latest release has been rebuilt with Apple’s Swift and offers users improved speed, battery efficiency, in-app notifications, and more.
Students learning to create apps with Apple’s Swift programming language now have a way to validate their skills with a new certification program. App Development with Swift is a new academic certification course created by Certiport in partnership with Apple that measures students’ ability to program with Swift after completing a year-long program.
Swift is Apple’s programing language designed from the ground up and coinciding with the other software releases today, Apple has pushed version 4.1 of Swift to developers…
Apple last year announced a major expansion of its Everyone Can Code initiative, aimed at making the Swift-based coding curriculum available to half a million Chicago students.
In support of this program, Apple has today revealed that Lane Tech College Prep High School – the venue for yesterday’s education event – will become a hub for teacher training in the curriculum …
It’s not every day that you get to hear Apple engineers openly talk about their day jobs, but episode 50 of the Swift Unwrapped podcast is an exception to that. Apple engineers Ben Cohen and Doug Gregor who both work on Apple’s Swift development language joined the latest episode of the Swift development podcast to discuss the upcoming release of Swift 4.1 and more.
Kode with Klossy is a coding program inspired by model and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss that encourages girls to learn code and become leaders in tech. The program originally launched in 2015, but today it has been announced that the program will continue this summer.
Kode with Klossy is completely free, and is available for girls ages 13-18, with a limited 1,000 slots available. The program will be expanding from 15 camps in 12 cities in 2017 to 50 camps in 25 cities across the United States.
A quarterly ranking of the most popular programming language found that Swift made it into the top 10 for the first time, and is now tied with Objective-C …
Alongside releasing iOS 11.3 beta 1 today, Apple has made Swift Playgrounds 2.0 available with a new subscriptions feature to follow third-party creators, new robots, a fresh content gallery, and more. The release has been in beta for developers by request since last fall.
Adoption of Apple’s ‘Everyone Can Code’ curriculum, offered free of charge to schools and colleges, continues. The company today announced that 70 colleges and universities in Europe have opted to offer the program to their students …
Apple has announced a major new expansion to its Everyone Can Code initiative, designed to teach students how to use its Swift coding language to create iOS apps.
Apple is promoting Hour of Code at its retail stores next week for the fifth year running with free coding classes for kids. Apple is also rolling out a new Swift Playgrounds challenge for Hour of Code to promote the company’s developer language using its educational iPad app.
Apple today announced that it is expanding its “Everyone Can Code” intititave to a new round of universities around the world. In a press release, the company revealed that the program is now available at more than 20 new colleges and universities, including Australia’s RMIT…
Freelance focused company Upwork has released a new report today with its list of the top 20 fastest-growing skills for Q3 2017. While broad categories like robotics and augmented reality were near the top, Apple specific skill sets in Final Cut Pro X and Swift also made the cut.
Tim Cook is touring France this week where he spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron about education and taxes, and a new video interview via Konbini shows the Apple CEO talking more about the former.
Earlier this summer Apple updated its Playgrounds iPad app with the ability to control drones and robots through coding courses that help users learn Apple’s Swift software development language. Today two new accessories have been added as Swift coding courses: Sphero Template and R2-D2 by Sphero.
Apple has today announced that is launching a new app development curriculum designed to teach students how to start using Swift to create fully functional iPhone apps. The course is available for free on iBooks(plus teacher’s guide) for anyone to download, and builds on the Everyone Can Code series Apple already publishes.
This fall, Apple says six American community colleges will teach the curriculum as well as ‘select high schools’. Apple wants to help more people learn to code and enter the app economy.
Apple has partnered with Tynker, a San Francisco-based STEM education platform, to release two new game-based programming lessons aimed to help kids learn how to code. The new Space Cadet and Dragon Spells courses are available for free.
A new development learning course based in Italy claims to be the first of its kind to let you program for Android … using Apple’s Swift developer language.
Following last year’s Swift 3.0 release, Apple has officially released Swift 3.1 today with Xcode 8.3. Now that Swift has hit its first major point release in third iteration, the team will be putting their focus onto Swift 4.
Swift Playgrounds, an iPad app which provides an introduction to Apple’s Swift programming language, is now available in five additional languages: Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Latin American Spanish.
Apple said that all of the coding lessons support the new languages, with English speakers also benefiting …
The Tiobe Index – which measures the popularity of programming languages on a monthly basis – reports that Apple’s Swift has made it into the top 10 for the first time. Tiobe says that ratings are based on three factors, using search engines to carry out the research.
The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. It is important to note that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.
While a relatively new programming language making it into the top 10 is an impressive achievement, Tiobe does not believe that it will climb any higher in the rankings …