Learning to code Swift

It’s the next logical step for me. I’ve decided that I need to learn a new language, and it makes sense that it’s Apple’s very own baby, Swift.

I signed up to Treehouse, and I’m doing the painstaking task of going through every track and every video to learn the basics of the language before moving onto other, more advanced bits.

So far I have covered a lot of stuff that I already know, albeit in a slightly different style. As a freelance web designer, I’ve been working with JavaScript and PHP for years, and Swift does tend to have a lot of the same features (most programming languages do seem to). So loops, foreach statements, switches, if, then, else statements are all pretty vanilla. But I think it is important to learn things the right way, from the ground up – otherwise you leave yourself open to problems later on.

Next up in my track is 90mins on Swift Functions – which again, having worked in JS and PHP, I know an awful lot about – but it may differ in Swift, so only time will tell.

The first thing I want to be able to do is have a simple game, the likes of a space invaders type clone – just for me, and then move onto bigger and better things.

Why I am learning this? Well, aside from wanted to expand my knowledge base. I think Swift will form the basis of a lot of forward thinking technology movements going forwards. Moving on from simple apps and games, we’ll start using things like Apple TV, Siri and Apple Watch in whole new ways. And to be in on the relative ground level is important.

The future holds a lot of Augmented Reality, as realised in the recent F8 keynote. And having a solid grasp of languages like Swift will allow me to work on things like this almost immediately.

What’s the long term aim? Probably to provide iOS application development, for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch and Mac OS too. But in the shorter term, I’ll be launching some pretty basic, and probably very annoying little games on the app-store.

Wish me luck. I’ll do my best to update people on my journey as I go!