Application Development with Swift

Develop highly efficient and appealing iOS applications by using the Swift language

About This Book

• Develop a series of applications with Swift using the development kits and new/updated APIs
• Use the new features of iOS 8 to add new flavor to your applications
• A hands-on guide with detailed code snippets to aid you in developing powerful Swift applications

Who This Book Is For

If you are an iOS developer with experience in Objective-C, and wish to develop applications with Swift, then this book is ideal for you. Familiarity with the fundamentals of Swift is an added advantage but not a necessity.

What You Will Learn

• Use playgrounds in Xcode to make the writing of Swift code productive and easy
• Get acquainted with the advanced features of Swift and make complete use of them in your code
• Add a new method for authentication to your app using Touch ID
• Develop health-related apps using HealthKit
• Take your apps to the next level of performance and capability using Metal
• Develop applications for wearables using WatchKit
• Use Notification Center to easily access all your notifications
• Make your users devices more stylish by using Apple's built-in Quick Type keyboard, instead of the native one

In Detail

After years of using Objective-C for developing apps for iOS/Mac OS, Apple now offers a new, creative, easy, and innovative programming language for application development, called Swift. Swift makes iOS application development a breeze by offering speed, security and power to your application development process. Swift is easy to learn and has awesome features such as being open source, debugging,interactive playgrounds, error handling model, and so on. Swift has simplified its memory management with Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) and it is compatible with Objective-C.

This book has been created to provide you with the information and skills you need to use the new programming language Swift. The book starts with an introduction to Swift and code structure. Following this, you will use playgrounds to become familiar with the language in no time. Then the book takes you through the advanced features offered by Swift and how to use them with your old Objective-C code or projects. You will then learn to use Swift in real projects by covering APIs such as HealthKit, Metal, WatchKit, and Touch ID in each chapter. The book's easy to follow structure ensures you get the best start to developing applications with Swift.

Style and approach

The book achieves its end goal by dividing its content into two parts. Part 1 will take the readers, who are new to Swift, through its architecture and basics. Part 2 of the book will cover content on application development with Swift.