9 ms·

And just today I was contemplating writing my first native iOS and macOS app... I was looking at the options and decided to go native with Swift. I have never w

by ssijak 9y ago

And just today I was contemplating writing my first native iOS and macOS app... I was looking at the options and decided to go native with Swift. I have never written Objective-C app and never used x-code for dev. But I have ~10 years of dev experience, mostly Java and Python on the backend and front end dev exp mostly with Angular. Some Android, and a little from <input_random_tech_here> because I like to experiment. So, my question is. How hard and enjoyable is for someone like me to write not very complex native iOS/macOS app in Swift starting from scratch? Best resource to start with?

caiob 9y ago
This is the question I've been asking my iOS dev buddies, with a catch: I want up-to-date resources. None of them were able to share a link so far.
- ssijak 9y ago
  Yeah, up-to-date was assumed in my post. I don`t want a post about Objective-C from 2012. I don`t know if it is against the guidelines to post this kind of links but I found this https://designcode.io/ https://designcode.io/ (I have 0 affiliations with the product) that looks just like what I need. From 0 to app in the newest stack, would probably buy and try it if somebody does not have something better in mind?
  - tarentel 9y ago
    No idea how good that book is but that newest stack won't be the newest in maybe a month or so. Assuming that is well written most of it will be applicable or will need only minor updating. That's probably why no iOS dev (from the original comment) can find anything "up to date" because we're right on the edge of a new release.
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    > Yeah, up-to-date was assumed in my post. I don`t want a post about Objective-C from 2012. What a ridiculous statement. Most of those resources are excellent and relevant today. An article/blog post on calendrical or localization or accessibility is still as relegate today, as “back in the day” in 2012. This is not some web “dev” nonsense where the “stack” changes every year and a half. iOS and macOS consist of some tried and tested APIs that are decades old.
bsaul 9y ago
Hardest part isn't the language. Swift is among the best languages you can get today. IOS sdk, on the other hand, has become a bit of a mess, due largely to the pace at which the field is moving ( although not as bad as android). Stanford courses are the best you can find online for free. https://youtu.be/HitSIzPM_6E https://youtu.be/HitSIzPM_6E
- ssijak 9y ago
  Thanks, this looks really promising!
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"IOS sdk, on the other hand, has become a bit of a mess, due largely to the pace at which the field is moving ( although not as bad as android)." Could you elaborate on whats messy with these SDKs?
  - bsaul 9y ago
    For ios : look at the number of various apis you can use to do widget positionning and animations : calayer, uiview spring n struts, constraints, physic based, and yet none compose well with each other. IOS also doesn't have any good tech for offline storage ( core data should be burried once and for all) and swift relies on compile-time codegen hack to provide easy struct serialization, because techs like nscoding relied on obj-c runtime facilities and the language itself doesn't provide enough metaprogramming facilities to compensate. Also, patterns like KVO are still found from time to time as a last resort in frameworks, while being famously unsafe and still rely on the obj-c runtime. For android basically everything should be rewritten from scratch. Last time i managed a team of android developpers, we basically came to the conclusion that doing regular mvc while supporting a good market share meant recoding our own controller base classes and screen transitionning apis.
    - _delirium 9y ago
      It also doesn't help that these APIs are rapidly changing, in ways ranging from minor rearrangements that the XCode auto-upgrader can mostly handle, to real porting hassles. I've been working on a project that was started in early 2016, so it was originally in Swift 2, the then-current version. A ton of things changed for Swift 3, which came out 6 months later, in late 2016. And a bunch of things are changing again with Swift 4 (although not as many as in the 2->3 upgrade). I haven't yet looked into Swift 5, but presumably that brings yet more API changes. A lot of time is spent just on this treadmill of porting previously working things to modified APIs. To make it worse, you have to manage a 4-way compatibility matrix between Swift versions, XCode versions, iOS versions, and macOS versions, where only very specific combinations work.
andrewljohnson 9y ago
I'd use react-native if I were you. I think you'd pick up Swift pretty easily given your polyglot background, but if you already know javascript and you aren't doing something that screams to be native, RN would be my choice. You'll get to work in a familiar language, and get an Android version with much less work than if you do swift. Best resource to start a react native app I'd say is this, it was really easy for me: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started... For Swift, here's a page from Apple, but I just plucked it from Google: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=16 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=16
- ssijak 9y ago
  I evaluated react native and I really like what I saw and was on the edge to use it. BUT, I am still afraid that it will bite me somewhere in time where it will hurt much. For example, I want to build an app with 50% standard interface stuff and about 50% custom, with some animations throughout the interface. From what I gathered reading other people experiences it would be a bit of a pain in react native. And the other smaller reason is that I want to build native macOS app that goes along with it and as far as I can tell from my own experience, only natively written apps feel good on osx. And just don`t mention Electron, I hate it.
  - __sr__ 9y ago
    > And just don`t mention Electron, I hate it. Election is the new Flash. All hail new Flash! /s Seriously, how do supposedly smart people come up with things like Electron?
    - __sr__ 9y ago
      Why was it downvoted?
      - detaro 9y ago
        Sarcastic comments repeating the sentiment of the parent don't add value to the discussion.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
developer2 9y ago
Regarding iOS and macOS kits, all of the documentation is in Objective-C. The libraries' Obj-C is imported and usable with Swift-only code, but the Swift documentation lazily links you to examples in the Obj-C docs. You have to perform trial-and-error by manually converting the Obj-C examples into the equivalent Swift (which often entails renamed classes, methods, types, etc.). If your projects typically do a lot of string parsing, get ready for a world of hell. Swift 4 didn't improve upon the very basic ability to extract a substring from the middle of a string. It takes 3-4 lines of code, with throwaway explicitly defined variables, to do the equivalent of a str.substr(start, end|length). It boggles the mind that you can't do a str.utf8.substr(3, 5) in Swift.
- futurix 9y ago
  Did you forget to switch documentation from Objective-C to Swift?
- mahyarm 9y ago
  String operations are also really slow in swift. Python is the same speed or faster
  - dep_b 9y ago
    I only remember a very early review of string operation speeds that was pretty bad at times indeed. But that was about Swift 1 and the string implementation has been changed a few times. Do you have any recent source?
    - mahyarm 9y ago
      Personal experience making the same command line util in python and swift 3 that was parsing code with the same C library (sourcekit) and then doing a bunch of string manipulation after that. Optimized swift 3 & python were the same speed, with %80 of the time being spent in the C library. I would expect swift would at least be 2x faster in that %20 portion that wasn't sourcekit library.
delegate 9y ago
Depending on complexity of your app and the level of polish, it might take a while. I mean, you can make an app in a day if you follow a tutorial, but if you want to enjoy the language and what you're doing, then you'll have to put in the effort. Objective-C can probably be avoided, but will help a lot in some cases - especially when interfacing with libraries written in ObjC or C++. So you might want to learn them in parallel, or at least spend a bit of time understanding the semantics of the language, memory management, concurrency, etc. Oh and native iOS is different from native macOS, some APIs are not compatible, but you can reuse quite a bit of utility-level functions related to your app (since it's the same language). I enjoyed learning ObjC and Swift and writing apps for iOS, the only issue I have with this platform is that it's too crowded for (new) solo devs. If you don't care about that as much, then by all means go ahead, you will love it.
lordnacho 9y ago
I did this a couple of years ago on a completely fresh MVP for a friend. Worked fine, my background was in trading systems using C#, Python, and C++. I'd also done a lot of Android Java for another app MVP, so interesting to compare how iOS and Android do things. I think most people who've done a few languages are not going to find a lot of problems with Swift. There's a lot of nice sugar in there to keep things neat. Your main issue if you haven't done iOS before is learning iOS. It's a bit weird, you can tell some libs haven't been upgraded while others have. The old libs need a bridge header and have weird relics from Obj-C. Also the whole constraints layout system might take some getting used to, but I did manage to build some pretty complex components with it. It didn't seem to map well onto the Android layout engine, but I'm not that experienced with the layout engines.
smegel 9y ago
> How hard and enjoyable is for someone like me to write not very complex native iOS/macOS app in Swift starting from scratch? Your biggest problem won't be the language, but the 30,000 other apps uploaded to the App Store every single day.
alexashka 9y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this but I'd say the #1 resource for learning the practical 'how do I get X thing done in a couple of hours' are tutorials on https://www.raywenderlich.com/ https://www.raywenderlich.com/ without a doubt. It has tutorials for every basic question imaginable in a very easy to follow manner. It'll definitely take some time, as for being enjoyable - I don't get a kick out of learning an entire new set of libraries and idioms for achieving the same thing I can do in another toolset, but if you do, then great :) One last thing - the amount of information for macOS is about 1% compared to iOS, so I'd definitely go the iOS route.
- Tanegashima 9y ago
  Ray Wanderlich tutorials are good quality, but I don’t really like the way he writes. I recommend to look at this site, he’s a really “clean” teacher https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ https://www.hackingwithswift.com/
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  > One last thing - the amount of information for macOS is about 1% compared to iOS, so I'd definitely go the iOS route. I thought that too, but it’s not accurate at all, from recent experience. There is a lot of hidden treasure for macOS, but it is buried under layers of bad Google results because somehow “NSViewController” makes Google shows me results for “UIAppDelegate” and “UIView”—makes sense. A lot of information is out there, on SO, Apple developer forums and mailing lists.
shanev 9y ago
You'll get up to speed in no time. Start with WWDC videos [1] in an area you're interested in. Then play around with some of Apple's sample code [2] and modify an app to your liking. After you're a little more advanced, check out the resources at objc.io [3]. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/ [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/navigation/ https://developer.apple.com/library/content/navigation/ [3]: https://www.objc.io https://www.objc.io
physicsyogi 9y ago
Hacking With Swift is pretty good for learning iOS and Swift. https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ https://www.hackingwithswift.com/
- samcat116 9y ago
  ^ can confirm all of the books by Paul are really well written
jnbiche 9y ago
I suspect that with your Java, you'll find Swift to be a snap to get started in, particularly if you've also experimented ever with Scala. Mastering idiomatic Swift is a bit harder, but definitely doable with a bit of effort.

by ssijak 9y ago

caiob 9y ago

This is the question I've been asking my iOS dev buddies, with a catch: I want up-to-date resources. None of them were able to share a link so far.

ssijak 9y ago
Yeah, up-to-date was assumed in my post. I don`t want a post about Objective-C from 2012. I don`t know if it is against the guidelines to post this kind of links but I found this https://designcode.io/ https://designcode.io/ (I have 0 affiliations with the product) that looks just like what I need. From 0 to app in the newest stack, would probably buy and try it if somebody does not have something better in mind?
- tarentel 9y ago
  No idea how good that book is but that newest stack won't be the newest in maybe a month or so. Assuming that is well written most of it will be applicable or will need only minor updating. That's probably why no iOS dev (from the original comment) can find anything "up to date" because we're right on the edge of a new release.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  > Yeah, up-to-date was assumed in my post. I don`t want a post about Objective-C from 2012. What a ridiculous statement. Most of those resources are excellent and relevant today. An article/blog post on calendrical or localization or accessibility is still as relegate today, as “back in the day” in 2012. This is not some web “dev” nonsense where the “stack” changes every year and a half. iOS and macOS consist of some tried and tested APIs that are decades old.

bsaul 9y ago

Hardest part isn't the language. Swift is among the best languages you can get today. IOS sdk, on the other hand, has become a bit of a mess, due largely to the pace at which the field is moving ( although not as bad as android). Stanford courses are the best you can find online for free. https://youtu.be/HitSIzPM_6E https://youtu.be/HitSIzPM_6E

ssijak 9y ago
Thanks, this looks really promising!
bogomipz 9y ago
>"IOS sdk, on the other hand, has become a bit of a mess, due largely to the pace at which the field is moving ( although not as bad as android)." Could you elaborate on whats messy with these SDKs?
- bsaul 9y ago
  For ios : look at the number of various apis you can use to do widget positionning and animations : calayer, uiview spring n struts, constraints, physic based, and yet none compose well with each other. IOS also doesn't have any good tech for offline storage ( core data should be burried once and for all) and swift relies on compile-time codegen hack to provide easy struct serialization, because techs like nscoding relied on obj-c runtime facilities and the language itself doesn't provide enough metaprogramming facilities to compensate. Also, patterns like KVO are still found from time to time as a last resort in frameworks, while being famously unsafe and still rely on the obj-c runtime. For android basically everything should be rewritten from scratch. Last time i managed a team of android developpers, we basically came to the conclusion that doing regular mvc while supporting a good market share meant recoding our own controller base classes and screen transitionning apis.
  - _delirium 9y ago
    It also doesn't help that these APIs are rapidly changing, in ways ranging from minor rearrangements that the XCode auto-upgrader can mostly handle, to real porting hassles. I've been working on a project that was started in early 2016, so it was originally in Swift 2, the then-current version. A ton of things changed for Swift 3, which came out 6 months later, in late 2016. And a bunch of things are changing again with Swift 4 (although not as many as in the 2->3 upgrade). I haven't yet looked into Swift 5, but presumably that brings yet more API changes. A lot of time is spent just on this treadmill of porting previously working things to modified APIs. To make it worse, you have to manage a 4-way compatibility matrix between Swift versions, XCode versions, iOS versions, and macOS versions, where only very specific combinations work.

andrewljohnson 9y ago

I'd use react-native if I were you. I think you'd pick up Swift pretty easily given your polyglot background, but if you already know javascript and you aren't doing something that screams to be native, RN would be my choice. You'll get to work in a familiar language, and get an Android version with much less work than if you do swift. Best resource to start a react native app I'd say is this, it was really easy for me: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started... For Swift, here's a page from Apple, but I just plucked it from Google: https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=16 https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=16

ssijak 9y ago
I evaluated react native and I really like what I saw and was on the edge to use it. BUT, I am still afraid that it will bite me somewhere in time where it will hurt much. For example, I want to build an app with 50% standard interface stuff and about 50% custom, with some animations throughout the interface. From what I gathered reading other people experiences it would be a bit of a pain in react native. And the other smaller reason is that I want to build native macOS app that goes along with it and as far as I can tell from my own experience, only natively written apps feel good on osx. And just don`t mention Electron, I hate it.
- __sr__ 9y ago
  > And just don`t mention Electron, I hate it. Election is the new Flash. All hail new Flash! /s Seriously, how do supposedly smart people come up with things like Electron?
  - __sr__ 9y ago
    Why was it downvoted?
    - detaro 9y ago
      Sarcastic comments repeating the sentiment of the parent don't add value to the discussion.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

developer2 9y ago

Regarding iOS and macOS kits, all of the documentation is in Objective-C. The libraries' Obj-C is imported and usable with Swift-only code, but the Swift documentation lazily links you to examples in the Obj-C docs. You have to perform trial-and-error by manually converting the Obj-C examples into the equivalent Swift (which often entails renamed classes, methods, types, etc.). If your projects typically do a lot of string parsing, get ready for a world of hell. Swift 4 didn't improve upon the very basic ability to extract a substring from the middle of a string. It takes 3-4 lines of code, with throwaway explicitly defined variables, to do the equivalent of a str.substr(start, end|length). It boggles the mind that you can't do a str.utf8.substr(3, 5) in Swift.

futurix 9y ago
Did you forget to switch documentation from Objective-C to Swift?
mahyarm 9y ago
String operations are also really slow in swift. Python is the same speed or faster
- dep_b 9y ago
  I only remember a very early review of string operation speeds that was pretty bad at times indeed. But that was about Swift 1 and the string implementation has been changed a few times. Do you have any recent source?
  - mahyarm 9y ago
    Personal experience making the same command line util in python and swift 3 that was parsing code with the same C library (sourcekit) and then doing a bunch of string manipulation after that. Optimized swift 3 & python were the same speed, with %80 of the time being spent in the C library. I would expect swift would at least be 2x faster in that %20 portion that wasn't sourcekit library.

delegate 9y ago

Depending on complexity of your app and the level of polish, it might take a while. I mean, you can make an app in a day if you follow a tutorial, but if you want to enjoy the language and what you're doing, then you'll have to put in the effort. Objective-C can probably be avoided, but will help a lot in some cases - especially when interfacing with libraries written in ObjC or C++. So you might want to learn them in parallel, or at least spend a bit of time understanding the semantics of the language, memory management, concurrency, etc. Oh and native iOS is different from native macOS, some APIs are not compatible, but you can reuse quite a bit of utility-level functions related to your app (since it's the same language). I enjoyed learning ObjC and Swift and writing apps for iOS, the only issue I have with this platform is that it's too crowded for (new) solo devs. If you don't care about that as much, then by all means go ahead, you will love it.

lordnacho 9y ago

I did this a couple of years ago on a completely fresh MVP for a friend. Worked fine, my background was in trading systems using C#, Python, and C++. I'd also done a lot of Android Java for another app MVP, so interesting to compare how iOS and Android do things. I think most people who've done a few languages are not going to find a lot of problems with Swift. There's a lot of nice sugar in there to keep things neat. Your main issue if you haven't done iOS before is learning iOS. It's a bit weird, you can tell some libs haven't been upgraded while others have. The old libs need a bridge header and have weird relics from Obj-C. Also the whole constraints layout system might take some getting used to, but I did manage to build some pretty complex components with it. It didn't seem to map well onto the Android layout engine, but I'm not that experienced with the layout engines.

smegel 9y ago

> How hard and enjoyable is for someone like me to write not very complex native iOS/macOS app in Swift starting from scratch? Your biggest problem won't be the language, but the 30,000 other apps uploaded to the App Store every single day.

alexashka 9y ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this but I'd say the #1 resource for learning the practical 'how do I get X thing done in a couple of hours' are tutorials on https://www.raywenderlich.com/ https://www.raywenderlich.com/ without a doubt. It has tutorials for every basic question imaginable in a very easy to follow manner. It'll definitely take some time, as for being enjoyable - I don't get a kick out of learning an entire new set of libraries and idioms for achieving the same thing I can do in another toolset, but if you do, then great :) One last thing - the amount of information for macOS is about 1% compared to iOS, so I'd definitely go the iOS route.

Tanegashima 9y ago
Ray Wanderlich tutorials are good quality, but I don’t really like the way he writes. I recommend to look at this site, he’s a really “clean” teacher https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ https://www.hackingwithswift.com/
LeoNatan25 9y ago
> One last thing - the amount of information for macOS is about 1% compared to iOS, so I'd definitely go the iOS route. I thought that too, but it’s not accurate at all, from recent experience. There is a lot of hidden treasure for macOS, but it is buried under layers of bad Google results because somehow “NSViewController” makes Google shows me results for “UIAppDelegate” and “UIView”—makes sense. A lot of information is out there, on SO, Apple developer forums and mailing lists.

shanev 9y ago

You'll get up to speed in no time. Start with WWDC videos [1] in an area you're interested in. Then play around with some of Apple's sample code [2] and modify an app to your liking. After you're a little more advanced, check out the resources at objc.io [3]. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/ [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/navigation/ https://developer.apple.com/library/content/navigation/ [3]: https://www.objc.io https://www.objc.io

physicsyogi 9y ago

Hacking With Swift is pretty good for learning iOS and Swift. https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ https://www.hackingwithswift.com/

samcat116 9y ago
^ can confirm all of the books by Paul are really well written

jnbiche 9y ago

I suspect that with your Java, you'll find Swift to be a snap to get started in, particularly if you've also experimented ever with Scala. Mastering idiomatic Swift is a bit harder, but definitely doable with a bit of effort.