Swift (or in other words, “Et tu, Objective-C?”)
Well the WWDC keynote has come and gone. And what do you know, a developer conference keynote geared towards developers. I guess all those bloggers and press types that took up some of the WWDC tickets from us actual developers are pretty disappointed today, as there were no shiny new devices shown.
The big announcement in my opinion was Swift, which will be the successor to Objective-C for developing on the Mac and iOS platforms. It looks somewhat interesting, as yet again they have lowered the bar and made it much easier to develop software for their platforms. But this is a disadvantage as well as a strength, as folks will continue to churn out the clones and inferior products that clutter up the App Store.
I applaud Apple for creating Swift and not recycling an existing language such as Ruby, Python, or Javascript, as these languages all come with their own baggage. Hopefully I will not be throwing away the 6 years of experience that I have built up with Objective-C and they will allow it to be used for the foreseeable future.
Ah, I miss the days when retain/release separated the men from the boys in the iOS world…
There was some good news in the presentations from yesterday. In the Platforms State of the Union presentation, they indicated that the 100 device barrier for beta testing and internal testing will essentially be rendered moot through Apple’s integration of TestFlight. This feature can’t come soon enough for me, so please hurry up Apple.
BTW, so many birthdays today, not sure where to begin… Kerry King of Slayer (happy 50th), Ian Hunter most famously of Mott the Hoople, Chuck Barris of the Gong Show… But the name that jumps out for me is Tristan Rogers, currently portraying Colin on The Young And The Restless. Happy Birthday, mate!