Upwork, a website dedicated to connecting freelancers with projects, has just released their latest quarterly report of the fastest-growing skills seen on their site. Today’s release lists the top 20 fastest-growing skills from Q4 of 2016. Without much of a surprise, natural language processing is listed up at number one, with Apple’s Swift programming language coming in strong at number two.
[UPDATE: Chris Lattner has tweeted his reaction to the BI piece, calling it “fabricated or speculating”.]
The surprise decision of Swift creator and long-time Xcode lead Chris Lattner to leave Apple was in large part driven by his frustration with the culture of secrecy at the company, say developer friends.
Lattner, who was Apple’s head of developer tools and widely respected as the voice of developers within the company, left the company after more than a decade to lead Tesla’s Autopilot software efforts …
Update: Tesla has announced that Lattner is joining its Autopilot team. Read more on Electrek.
Veteran Apple employee Chris Lattner shared publicly today that he is leaving the company after more than a decade. Lattner is widely known in the Apple development community as dev-friendly force within the company and the leading figure behind Apple’s Swift programming language.
As it originally announced back in July, Apple has confirmed that it plans to release Swift 3.1 sometime during the Spring of 2017. Following the Swift 3.1 release, focus will shift to Swift 4.
Swift 3.1 is intended to be source compatible with Swift 3.0. It will contain a few additive enhancements to the core language as well as improvements to the Swift Package Manager, Swift on Linux, and general quality improvements to the compiler and Standard Library.
Swift 3.1 is intended to be released in the spring of 2017.
Update: Registration is now open.
Apple’s annual Hour of Code workshops are kicking off this year at Apple Stores across the world during the week of December 5, and this year there’s a new app in play: Swift Playgrounds. Apple introduced user-friendly coding app for iPad earlier this year as a way to introduce new developers to Swift, Apple’s programming language.
IBM has announced the next step in its continued implementation of support for Apple’s Swift. The company announced in a blog post recently that Swift is officially available on the server, inducing the Bluemix Runtime for the development language.
Apple’s recently open-sourced programming language, Swift, may be seeing itself get adopted into Google’s Android platform in the future. Sources have told The Next Web that Google is “considering making Swift a ‘first class’ language for Android”.
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Stack Overflow reports that more developers now use OS X than Linux as their primary OS, and that if the trend continues, fewer than half of all developers will be using Windows next year.
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.
Only months after Apple officially open-sourced Swift, IBM today is announcing that they are bringing Apple’s Swift programming language to the cloud. This makes IBM the first cloud provider enabling Swift application development server-side. IBM has also introduced a preview to a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog to help with code sharing, and distribution.
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.
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.
The TIOBE index uses search engine rankings to track popularity of programming languages. In January, Swift overtook Objective-C to become the 14th most popular language in the TIOBE index. The surge in popularity was spurred by the release of Swift into open-source in December. With developer interest growing, Ryan Olson was interested in how much Apple is using Swift for its own apps.
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.
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’.
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.
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…
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.
The Apple Developer portal has gone down ahead of Apple’s WWDC event later today, where Apple will announce its next-generation software platforms for Apple Watch, iOS and OS X. Posters from within the venue show that Watch OS will feature prominently as a newly rebranded as ‘watchOS’.
Update: The Beta Software Program page has also gone down — potentially indicating that iOS 9 or OS X 10.11 will be made available as public betas today.
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.
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…
[tweet https://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/565001293975257091]
Wil Shipley, a developer whose association with Apple began with a contract for NeXT, has posted two tweets in praise of Swift shortly after Apple’s “significant update” to the programming language.
Shipley says he feels the same way about Swift that he did when he first saw Cocoa on the NeXT platform, and that Objective-C is a “crapshack” of a language in comparison.
The developer co-founded The Omni Group in 1991, one of the few companies to create apps for NeXT and eventually OS X. He won a record five Apple Design Awards while at Omni, winning three more at the second company he founded, Delicious Monster. All of Delicious Monster’s other staff were later hired by Apple.
Shipley spoke at WWDC in 2005 and 2007, and was listed as one of the most influential members of the Mac community by MacTech Magazine for two years running.
While Swift has been very well received by other developers, its rapidly-changing nature does pose some challenges. New versions are backwards-compatible, but developers have to make changes to code in order to fully support new versions of iOS.
Grab a $29 Swift Assets+ Tutorial Here or jump on Stanford’s iTunes Swift Course for free.
Today Stanford is releasing its first course on Apple’s new Swift programming language for iOS and OS X and it’s available to all through iTunes U.
The course, Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift, is offered every year by professor Paul Hegarty through Stanford’s School of Engineering but now for the first time has been updated for iOS 8 and Swift. The course includes an Introduction to iOS, Xcode 6, and Swift, More Xcode and Swift, Using MVC in iOS, Swift and Foundation, and more.
Updated for iOS 8 and Swift. Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms using the iOS SDK. User interface design for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multi-touch technologies. Object-oriented design using model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, Swift programming language. Other topics include: animation, mobile device power management, multi-threading, networking and performance considerations.
The course is available through iTunes U now.
For $29 9to5Toys Specials offers a Mammoth Interactive Swift Course & Xcode 6 Templates