In an unprecedented move, somebody at Apple tries to be more open to the developers

Jul 11, 2014 18:43 GMT  ·  By

This is something totally new in Apple's marketing and PR strategy. That is because this is the first official blog coming from Apple, if you're leaving aside the Hot News section. 

 
The blog was opened on Friday on the section dedicated to iOS and OS X Developers, and so far there are only two articles that welcome everyone to the blog and offer some technical info on the Swift Programming Language. 
 
Apple employees united under "The Swift Team" name promise the developers to bring behind-the-scenes info about the design of Swift. All the information should come straight from the engineers who wrote the Language. 
 
They also provide a link to download the latest Xcode 6 beta and get started with Swift.
 
When it comes to Compatibility, the team promises the developers who write code for iOS and OS X Yosemite that their apps will work well in the future. "In fact, you can target back to OS X Mavericks or iOS 7 with that same app. This is possible because Xcode embeds a small Swift runtime library within your app's bundle. Because the library is embedded, your app uses a consistent version of Swift that runs on past, present, and future OS releases."
 
The article goes on talking about Binary Compatibility and Frameworks. Developers are asked to have all components of their app built with the same version of Xcode and the Swift compiler to ensure that they work together. 
 
The Swift team is convinced that their programming language is ready to use today. The developers were pleased to see a couple of days ago that Swift received a significant update. 
 
Swift is brand new and its release was a total surprise for developers at WWDC 2014, hence the rather poor documentation. We have published a list of Swift online resources to get your feet wet. There's not much out there, besides the official User Guide and a couple of websites that promise video tutorials. 
 
On the other hand, this is Apple's first attempt to open up via a full-fledged blog. The is no comment box, so developers cannot ask anything right away, but they can use the Developers' Forum, should they need to find out more or solve the problems with the code in their apps.

Today, Apple has also made Xcode 6 Beta available for free to all registered developers.