Wow, this is an interesting/refreshing development from Apple. I can't recall them ever having a public blog to communicate with their developer community. Until now, it's mostly been through their developer forums, private support, and in-person at the yearly WWDC.<p>How they've developed as a developer-facing company this year is really encouraging. Google et al have always been transparent as glass relative to Apple's iOS work, but this blog, the twitter dialog from Swift's development team, and the no-NDA release of iOS8 has really changed my opinion of the direction they're pushing the ecosystem.
This is great news. Apple seems to be going the proactive route with all this. I think that's a really good idea on their part.<p>That said, as soon as I saw Swift was announced, I took the plunge and started my own journal about learning Swift.<p><a href="http://www.swiftpursuit.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.swiftpursuit.com</a><p>Figured I'd document my progress as I went along and it's been a lot of fun so far. This is something I plan on doing over the long haul and I'd like to get in some small 5-10 min videos that covers not only the language but also new things coming out in XCode as well.<p>I'm two posts behind, but I'm trying to release a new post every week. My biggest slow down has just been figuring out the blogging software and hosting.
I am currently downloading XCode 6.3 Beta [1] without being a registered developer (used my ordinary credentials), does that mean that I will be able to write applications and play with the REPL? Has it just been made available?<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_6_beta_3_lpw27r/xcode_6_beta_3.dmg" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/...</a>
It's really great to see Apple opening up - maybe not in their products, but in their culture. Programming language blog, a presence on social networks (mostly Twitter), posing for pictures with devs at WWDC, and generally embracing the dev community. All of these individual things seem small but together show a much more open side of Apple.<p>A side effect of these changes: Apple can control their own story now; whereas the rumor mill and the Apple-Needs-To-Release-A-New-Category-In-The-Next-30-Days-Or-They-Are-Doomed websites have been controlling their story/image for the past couple years.
Great timing, was just reading the Swift ebook<p><pre><code> let interestingNumbers = [
"Prime": [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13],
"Fibonacci": [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8],
"Square": [1, 4, 9, 16, 25],
]
var largest = 0
for (kind, numbers) in interestingNumbers {
for number in numbers {
if number > largest {
largest = number
}
}
}
largest
</code></pre>
Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.”
I like the idea of a blog, something where I can get official news and tips from is great. Perfect supplemental reading for all those blogs run by outside developers. I look forward to using Swift.<p>Also, for those that may have missed it, you can use Swift in XCode 6 beta, so long as you are a registered Apple Developer.