This week Apple held their annual WorldWide Developers Conference where they often unveil new versions of their software or, sometimes, new versions of their hardware. This year they focused primarily on the software with changes to OS X, iOS, and Apple Watch. Honestly, there wasn’t much that aroused my inner geek, in fact I probably have more to criticize than to condone.
I might as well talk about the one thing that had me a little excited and that was Apple talking about the next iteration of their new programming language, Swift 2. As I mentioned in a previous post, I enjoyed the proverbial “getting started” tutorials from a few months ago. I’m really looking forward not only to what Swift 2 will offer but I’m especially curious about what the open source community will do with it as well.
“El Capitan” is probably the worst name for a product since “Microsoft Edge”! Sure, I get why they chose that name, because its some rock edifice in Yosemite (that’s a better origin story than Microsoft Edge … which I don’t even think has an origin story) but its a terrible name for software. It doesn’t sound like a piece of software, it sounds like a mixed drink or amateur Mexican porn. I was listening to the CNET TV crew while the keynote was going on and someone said “Big Sur” was their choice for the name; I think that would have been a great name. I’m glad I won’t have to pay for the upgrade. (Side-note: The CNET TV crew were a lot of fun to listen to; I may have to start listening to their broadcasts each week).
A couple of months ago I decided to start diving into Swift. I know Swift is still in its infancy and Apple seems to be breaking it with every XCode/OS/language update. I had watched all of the videos Pluralsight had to offer (though I noticed they recently published new ones). I have dabbled in Objective-C prior to Swift’s announcement and it is as convoluted and cryptic that everyone says it is; but it’s not impossible to learn. Swift, however, would make iOS app development a heck of a lot easier.