A NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Years in the making, Swift is a new programming language for iOS and OS X apps. Sprouting modern features, it’s designed to be fast, easy to learn, and fun to use. But that doesn’t mean Objective-C died a sudden death. In fact, developers can use both, since Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C code in Xcode, Apple’s primary development tool.

More importantly, Swift is backed by the established Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, the same frameworks that current Objective-C-written apps access. This means there aren’t new frameworks to master, just one more way to use the same ones.

Another super-cool feature is Playgrounds, which lets developers see the coding results immediately, without the need to compile into an app first. If there’s one thing we don’t like about Swift, it’s that it isn’t an open standard. For Apple, that can only be a good thing because it dampens developers’ motivation when they want to port their hit apps to other platforms.