Swift

Fabric, a subsidiary of Twitter, has today expanded its comprehensive platform for developers by releasing an iPhone app, Fabric for iPhone. The app lets developers monitor various analytics and diagnostics about their applications while on the go. Stats like current active users and crash rates are instantly visible from the dashboard.

Most notably, the app features push notifications for realtime updates about major issues. For instance, developers will get a push alert if their app suddenly starts crashing for a new reason.

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If you’ve been following any of the Swift mailing lists and have begun to feel overwhelmed with the amount of conversations passing through, take a look at Benedikt Terhechte’s new beta app Hirundo. The app focuses on creating a comfortable reading experience for the multitude of mailing lists out there and allows users to easily find, bookmark, and mute messages they desire.

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Apple today announced in a post on its Swift blog that it is open sourcing the Swift benchmark suite. This announcement comes two months after the company made the Swift programming language open source, allowing the developer community to have direct access to the platform. Much like the rest of Swift, the benchmarking suite is available now on GitHub with an open source Apache license.

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Earlier this month, Apple made good on its promise and made its Swift programming language open source. Following the announcement, Apple’s senior vice president of software Craig Federighi did a pair of interviews to discuss the motivation behind open sourcing the platform and what the future holds. Now, Federighi has joined John Gruber on his podcast The Talk Show to further discuss Swift

Federighi opened the interview by discussing what kind of things Apple has noticed during the first week of Swift being open source. The Apple exec noted that Swift is more active than any other language on Github and that because of this, the Swift team within Apple is more engaged with developers than any other team in the company.

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This week we’ll get into the finale of our iPad Pro saga, talk about Dropbox’s decision to kill Mailbox, and why Apple has open-sourced Swift. The Happy Hour podcast is available for download on iTunes and through our dedicated RSS feed. Thanks to Audible.com, get your free 30 day trial at audible.com/happyhour.

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Last week Apple’s open sourcing of Swift naturally saw the spotlight thrown over Apple’s open source pages. This included a paragraph that claimed Apple was “the first major computer company to make Open Source a key part of its strategy”. Unsurprisingly, this riled some members of the developer community as being disingenuous and untrue.

So Apple has since changed the text to retract the rather outlandish statement with something a bit more muted. Although this statement is technically qualitative and open to many interpretations, Apple isn’t exactly known for its open source contributions. The page now reads as follows:

‘Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open source code’.

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IBM has today unveiled their first public effort towards Swift, with the introduction of the IBM Swift Sandbox website. You can type lines of Swift code into the text editor on the left and then run the code on a Linux server, posting the output in the right column. This is all made possible by the fact that Swift is now open source, supporting Linux alongside iOS and OS X.

You can use the core Swift language as well as the standard library functions, so writing a formulaic mathematical problem (like the Fibonacci example above) is well within the scope of the web application. The concept is similar to the CodeRunner app from the Mac App Store, except it runs entirely off a cloud infrastructure.

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Earlier today Apple made good on its promise and released source code for its Swift programming language to the public. To go along with making Swift open source, Apple’s senior vice president of software Craig Federighi has sat down for a pair of interviews to discuss the benefits of open souring Swift and what’s in store for the future…

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As promised earlier in the year, Apple’s Swift team has now posted source code for the Swift compiler and standard library functions and objects. Open-sourcing Swift is a big win for the developer community as it means Swift can now be setup to run on a server and many other use cases, bringing Apple programming talent and expertise beyond ‘just’ making apps iOS devices and Macs.

Making Swift open-source also gives the developer community as a whole more confidence in the language. Theoretically, if Apple ever decided to move away from Swift (which is unlikely), the language could be picked up by others and continue development and existing codebases could continue to be supported.

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Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is about to kick off. On Monday, June 8th, company executives will take the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to provide their annual roadmap for Apple’s software, services, and devices.

Traditionally, Apple has used the conference to introduce major upgrades to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system iOS, as well as the Mac operating system OS X, along with new services. Of course, 2015 will be no different. Apple has been preparing a new version of iOS 9 codenamed “Monarch,” a release of OS X 10.11 codenamed “Gala,” a new streaming Apple Music service based on Beats Music, and updates for the Apple Watch.

Over the last several years, we have provided advance reports on the lion’s share of announcements that will be made at WWDC, as well as a comprehensive roundup ahead of the event. Read on for our roundup of what’s coming, along with fresh new details not found in our earlier reports.

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For the first time in several years, Apple is changing up its annual iOS and OS X upgrade cycle by limiting new feature additions in favor of a “big focus on quality,” according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s operating system development plans. We first reported in February that iOS 9, codenamed “Monarch,” would heavily feature under-the-hood optimizations, and we’ve now learned that Apple is taking the same approach with OS X 10.11, codenamed “Gala.” Sources have revealed additional new details on how Apple will optimize the new operating systems for improved stability and performance, add several new security features, and make important changes to its Swift programming tools for developers…

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Apple has updated Final Cut Pro with support for native import, editing, and export of MXF video files, along with the capability to edit video encoded with Panasonic’s AVC-LongG codec. Several issues are fixed in this update as well, including problems importing certain clips from specific cameras, App Nap stopping long import operations, and errors in handling of 240fps video.

Xcode was also update with fixes for common SourceKit crashes when using the new Swift language. The full change logs for both apps are included below:

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