Does the new “closer to the metal” and Swift get any non-iOS devs curious about development? I might actually try it out though I never thought I’d do any iOS dev stuff.
gotta say i was impressed with the performance of the demo at wwdc. will definitely be looking at iOS now.
I’m a little big skeptical about Swift still. It’s nice and simple and everything, but another platform bound language? Yes I know, you might be able to compile for different platforms, but really, that’s rarely going to be a good idea, compared to other choices. At least not for new projects.
I thought one of the main advantages of Obj-C was, that it is a relatively high-level OO programming language, but you still have access to all the lower-level stuff and use C directly. With Swift you only get the high level.
It seems like they almost made a U turn on some of their philosophies. Suddenly they prefer abbreviations to verbosity. High level and safety over flexibility and freedom of choice.
It will certainly be a nice language for beginners, and bring lots of new developers to the apple platforms. But I hope it stays an alternative to Obj-C.
By the way, Metal is probably not something that will affect you directly. Unless you intend to write your own game engine or build something directly on top of a graphics library. It’s great nonetheless and nice to see that UE will be supporting it.
Will UE 4 be using Metal to Optimize iOS applications?
Apparently yes: UE4 “Zen Garden” using Metal API for iOS 8 revealed at WWDC - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums
Swift might be tied to the Apple platforms, but Objective-C is as well, so that is not a drawback. And while it’s less cluttered syntax makes it look like a simple, beginner-friendly language, I think it is much more than that. I contains a truck-load full of features that you find in modern, functional-oriented languages that can make your code very elegant and compact, but are a little hard to grasp at first (higher-order functions, closures, patterna matching etc). You can still use C/Objective-C for the low-level stuff, but I think it is very exciting to finally have an elegant, modern language especially for iOS development.
Wonder if it will be possible to use Swift in an unreal project for iOS specific code. I know Objective C can be used.
From what I understand you don’t have to do anything extra for your iOS game with UE, since EPIC is already including it?
I didn’t watch the demo only read a couple articles. I wasn’t sure if they had fully integrated the Metal API into the engine already or if they just made the demo for demonstration purposes and it may be much later until we got it.
good tutorial about swift and xcode
https://www.youtube.com/user/xcodeswift
easy to create your own game and app with xcode 