It ’s not every day that one gets to witness dramatic change materialize quietly at Apple , but that ’s exactly what took place on Friday , as the company ’s Swift teamlaunched its very own official blog .
As you may recall , Swift is a new programming language that senior vice president Craig Federighi announce at this year ’s Worldwide Developers Conference , which took place in San Francisco at the outset of June . Designed to — at least for now — run alongside the revered Objective - C , which harkens all the way back to the days of NeXT and OS X 10.0 , Swift is meant to modernize the room developers build their apps by adopting many epitome that have been available in other languages for a long time .
The fresh blog is notable for two reason ; the first is that — well , it ’s largelyunprecedented . While Apple ’s Developer Connection website has had a blog for many years , its contents are generally limited to fairly courtly communicating on everything from app review policies to the occasional schedule downtime that affects the online tools used by software engineer to write their software to the various App Stores . Outside of WWDC and the occasionalTechTalk term of enlistment , Apple ’s relationship with developers has always been so , well , sterile that something as cozy as a blog seems almost like a slightly offbeat japery .
Not just a pretty face
And this fetch me to the second intellect why the Swift blog is important : It signals just how vested Apple is in its new language , and how much its management wants it to succeed .
Even based on my brief exposure to the fresh engineering science , it ’s clear that Apple has invested a considerable amount of time and resource on it — particularly when you view that it had to accommodate thousands upon thousands of APIs for everything from nontextual matter attract to computer hardware communicating so that they would work seamlessly with it .
It ’s clear , then , that Swift is n’t just an experiment , or a “ hobby . ” It ’s the tool with which Apple wants to see tomorrow ’s apps build , and the language that is going to get the most maintenance and love cash in one’s chips forward .
From hobby to success
Money and programming imagination , however , are not going to be enough to give Swift the boost it needs to bring home the bacon . Unlike language like Java , which is loosely used on everything from Android devices to turgid - scale fiscal systems , it is aim - built to satisfy the very specific needs of Apple ’s own weapons platform .
In parliamentary law to thrive , Swift postulate one thing above all : developer buy - in . That ’s something that the company can only achieve by getting programmers as invested in its growth and evolution as possible . Personally , I would n’t be the least surprised if this blog were but the opening salvo in a barrage of unexampled enterprisingness centered around getting developers acquainted with Apple ’s plan for a futurity in whicheveryapp is built in Swift .
Regardless of the motivation behind it , this web log is great news . Apple ’s attitude towards developershas improved by leaps and boundssince WWDC , and the fact that it continue to do so can only mean that the tools and resources available to programmers will continue to amend at a rapid pace — a benefit that will at long last trickle down to us users in the form of better and more innovative apps .
