Today was a huge day not only for us at Mobile Makers but all developers. Apple announced at the WWDC that iOS 8 would be out in the fall and that they have a new programming language to use to build iphone apps called Swift. At first this really made me nervous that I am learning Objective-C now and then in the fall Swift will be introduced but the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. It is going to be a great opportunity for me to be on the same level as all other developers. No one is going to have 20 years of experience on me with Swift because we are all going to be new to it at the same time. I have already downloaded the 500 page Swift iBook and am going to read it daily. I couldn’t be more excited. Aside from that, Apple introduced some truly amazing features like continuity across all iOS devices and it should be an amazing experience when they are officially released.
I was the “driver” today in class. Meaning, that I was in charge of typing everything the instructor said. Kevin was our instructor today for the first time as Max is in SF for the WWDC. Kevin did a great job and I learned a lot of cool tricks like when initializing an array I can do NSMutableArray *array = [NSMutableArray array]; instead of the whole alloc]init]; It’s little short cuts like this that are going to save me a lot of time in the future.
We did data persistence today and I am still trying to wrap my head around it. It is basically a way to store data when the iphone is offline. I am going to need more time to work with it and really see how it works. For now, I am going to go code more and start reading some about Swift.
-Blake
blakeericmitchell 