As you may have already heard by now, Apple has announced a new programming language called Swift. It’s modern, powerful, and potentially easier to use than Objective-C. In fact, from the time I’ve spent tinkering with it, I’d say that those coming from an ActionScript or JavaScript background should find Swift a much more approachable language. So if you’ve always wanted to develop iOS and Mac OS X applications then this might be the ideal time to jump in.
I had a bit of spare time over the last few days so thought I’d flex my programming muscles and port the parallax scroller from my endless runner demo to Swift. Truth be told it was a fairly straight forward process and I’m looking forward to spending more time with the language over the coming months. If you fancy taking a look you can find the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/ccaleb/endless-runner
It’s also great to see a few familiar faces from the Flash community picking up Swift and blogging again for the first time in a while. Adobe’s Thibault Imbert has blown the cobwebs off his ByteArray blog and has already posted several great Swift tutorials for those coming from an ActionScript background. Lee Brimelow, who also works at Adobe, has set up a new blog dedicated to Swift tutorials, which is definitely worth checking out.
If you’re interested in learning Swift then Apple’s Introducing Swift website is a good place to start.