14 DAY TRIAL // Swift, an innovative programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch introduced at this year’s WWDC conference, promises to make game development more fun and more exciting than ever before. With its new Playgrounds feature, Swift lets the coder see changes replicated in real time in their moving app.
So, how long does it take to code a game like Flappy Bird, for instance? Not long, according to Nate Murray, a former engineer at IFTTT and the co-founder of online school Fullstack.io, which teaches folks how to develop apps.
After spending just four hours learning the nuts and bolts of Swift, Murray got busy and managed to clone Flappy Bird in another nine hours, which included a lunch break and putting the youngsters to bed.
Why did he choose Flappy? Murray explains, “Flappy Bird has this great balance of being relatively simple to implement but fun to play when you’re done.”
“One feature I’m particularly excited about is Playgrounds,” adds Murray. “I’ve been looking for a tool to teach programming for a long time. Earlier this year my co-founder and I released Choc, a browser tool a lot like playgrounds. Playgrounds seems like it could be the teaching tool I’ve been looking for.”
Anyone can download “The Swift Programming Language” from the iBooks Store and learn how to use it to make brilliant apps without the constraints of C compatibility.
According to Apple, “Swift adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun. Swift’s clean slate, backed by the mature and much-loved Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, is an opportunity to reimagine how software development works.”
The book provides a tour of the language, a detailed guide delving into each language feature, and a formal reference for the new programming language. To view the book, customers need an iOS device with iBooks 1.5 or later and iOS 4.3.3 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later.
Apple charges nothing for the Swift book, but in order to use it you’ll need a Mac running Yosemite and Xcode 6.
Swift is said to be the result of four years of research that Apple kept secret, “combined with decades of experience building Apple platforms,” the Mac maker adds on the marketing pages of Swift. To learn more about the language, visit Apple’s Swift section at developer.apple.com/swift/.