Category Archives: Swift

Getting into functional programming with Swift

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Josh Smith

This article examines two implementations of a logic puzzle written in Swift. The first example uses an imperative programming style, which is the style familiar to most iOS developers. Then we see the same small program written in a functional style, which is … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 12 Comments

A Swift App that Calls JSON Web Services

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Josh Smith

In this article I introduce a small iOS 8 app written in Swift, named SwiftPlaces. I wrote the app in order to get more experience with the language and try out some new features in iOS 8, such as Adaptive Layout. … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS8, Swift | 8 Comments

Simplifying NSJSONSerialization in Swift

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Josh Smith

While writing a pet project app in Swift I put together this convenience function that simplifies converting an NSData into JSON objects via the NSJSONSerialization class. My JSONObjectWithData function adds a Swift-friendly API on top of the Foundation method of the same name. Here is … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Nil-coalescing Operator in Swift

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Josh Smith

Update: As of Xcode 6 Beta 5 this article is obsolete. Swift now includes a nil coalescing operator (??). I am leaving this article on my blog for people who are curious about why such an operator exists or when … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 21 Comments

Custom Threading Operator in Swift

Posted on July 5, 2014 by Josh Smith

The Swift language supports custom operator functions, similar to operator overloading in C++. This kind of language feature has been known to enable overly “enthusiastic” developers to create a quagmire of unreadable code, which is why I was surprised to see … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

Understanding Swift’s reduce Method

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Josh Smith

Swift’s API includes many functions and instance methods that reflect its functional programming heritage. A prime example is called reduce.  You can reduce a collection of values down to just one value, such as calculating the sum of every person’s age in an array of … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Create a Swift Dictionary from an Array

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Josh Smith

Here is a Gist I posted showing a Swift utility function that enables you to create a Dictionary containing an optional entry for every element in an Array. It uses the reduce function to create one Dictionary from every element in … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Cross-join two Swift arrays

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Josh Smith

Here is a Gist I just published on GitHub of a utility function that performs a cross-join between two Swift arrays. This allows you to iterate over one array for every element in another array, and return an optional value built for … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Randomly shuffle a Swift array

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Josh Smith

I just posted a Gist on GitHub that shows how to add a shuffle method to Swift’s Array class, which randomizes the order of an array’s elements. My shuffle method relies on the arc4random function, which means that the file containing that extension … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Swift Case Study: Histograms

Posted on June 15, 2014 by Josh Smith

This article examines a program written in Swift that creates text-based histogram renderings. The purpose of this case study is to show how such a program can leverage features found in the initial pre-release version of Swift. The Xcode 6 project … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | 2 Comments