iOS courses are all updated to use Swift

My iOS courses are all fully updated to use Swift. When you attend the Foundation of iPhone Programming course, you will also get two nicely laminated Swift Cheat Sheets.  Use these cheat sheets to help you migrate your existing code to Swift. If you are a beginning iOS developer, these cheat sheets will save you lots of time.

Want your own cheat sheets? Download them here.

Learn Swift Programming - 1-2 Dec 2014

If you are an iOS developer, you should definitely get a head start in Apple's new programming language for developing iOS and Mac OS X applications. Designed to be an easy to learn and type-safe language, Swift allows developers to get productive in a very short time. Come and join us and learn all the important features of Swift in 2 days!

All attendees will get a copy of my latest book -Beginning Swift Programming, when it is published in Dec 2014. In addition, you will get  a Swift language reference guide that will come in handy as you code your way through Swift.

Topics that you will learn
• Introduction to Swift
• Data Types
• Strings and Characters
• Basic Operators
• Functions
• Collections
• Control Flow and Looping
• Classes, Structures, and Objects
• Class Inheritance
• Closures
• Protocols and Delegates
• Generics

Beginning Swift Programming - For Educators

My latest book- Beginning Swift Programming will be released in Dec 2014. Designed to be a gentle introduction to the new language, it is ideal for readers who are already familiar with object oriented programming, as well as existing iOS programmers who need a quick guide to the features and syntax of the language. Educators teaching the Swift Programming language will find this book a handy learning guide and resource. In addition, companion slides for educators are also available for adopters of this book. 

I am also currently conducting a 2 day course on Swift Programming worldwide. To run this class in your school/faculty, contact me for more details. 

Xcode 6 - iPhone Simulator Folder

In Xcode 6, the location of the applications on the iPhone Simulator has changed. Prior to iOS 8, the location of the Documents folder of your app can be found here:

/Users/weimenglee/Library/Application\ Support/iPhone\ Simulator/<iOS_Version>/Applications/<application_id>/Documents 

In xCode 6, the location of the simulator has changed to:

/Users/weimenglee/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/

However, this location contains a list of folders for different types of simulators. If you go into this folder, you will see something like this:

Each folder correspond to a specific iPhone Simulator. To know which folder corresponds to which simulator, use the following command in Terminal:

Weis-Mac-mini:~ weimenglee$ xcrun simctl list

== Device Types ==

iPhone 4s (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-4s)

iPhone 5 (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-5)

iPhone 5s (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-5s)

iPhone 6 Plus (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-6-Plus)

iPhone 6 (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPhone-6)

iPad 2 (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPad-2)

iPad Retina (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPad-Retina)

iPad Air (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.iPad-Air)

Resizable iPhone (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.Resizable-iPhone)

Resizable iPad (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimDeviceType.Resizable-iPad)

== Runtimes ==

iOS 7.0 (7.0 - Unknown) (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-7-0) (unavailable, runtime path not found)

iOS 7.1 (7.1 - Unknown) (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-7-1) (unavailable, runtime path not found)

iOS 8.0 (8.0 - 12A365) (com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-8-0)

== Devices ==

-- iOS 7.0 --

-- iOS 7.1 --

-- iOS 8.0 --

    iPhone 4s (8C1303A2-C590-4822-BB9B-12EC32035C8C) (Shutdown)

    iPhone 5 (402C822D-567F-4F3A-B113-1499C5A7949C) (Shutdown)

    iPhone 5s (B6D71F6A-E94B-47ED-AF25-882FDEF8E6F5) (Shutdown)

    iPhone 6 Plus (5BCD1507-6F06-4D66-B71D-47670EB703B2) (Shutdown)

    iPhone 6 (00100565-4E4D-4D9A-A875-544E0A6E4F4F) (Booted)

    iPad 2 (187D75DD-824D-4381-AE2F-BDF57FEB87E0) (Shutdown)

    iPad Retina (604667D3-8366-4147-B0AD-F7840198713C) (Shutdown)

    iPad Air (01D6AEBC-F12A-47EE-82CB-0140AF117AE0) (Shutdown)

    Resizable iPhone (9C138BCD-BFB9-4AEB-A218-F0F99F678220) (Shutdown)

    Resizable iPad (4966C908-AAA7-43EC-8E3A-EADF8BFA3C05) (Shutdown)

Weis-Mac-mini:~ weimenglee$ 

In my example here, I am looking for iPhone 6, which has the device id of 00100565-4E4D-4D9A-A875-544E0A6E4F4F. You can then go into this folder and the following path shows the folder that contains all the applications installed on this simulator:

/Users/weimenglee/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/00100565-4E4D-4D9A-A875-544E0A6E4F4F/data/Containers/Data/Application/

You can now locate your specific application and find the Documents folder:

/Users/weimenglee/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices/00100565-4E4D-4D9A-A875-544E0A6E4F4F/data/Containers/Data/Application/FD7949EA-7D39-4BC6-95F4-77F320592651/Documents/

The Swift Programming Language - Lesson #3 - Dictionaries

In this lesson, you will learn how to create and use dictionaries in Swift.

Dictionaries

A dictionary is a collection of objects of the same type that is identified using a key. Consider the following example:

var platforms = [

    "Apple": "iOS",

    "Google" : "Android",

    "Microsoft" : "Windows Phone"

]

Here, platforms is a dictionary containing three items. Each item is a key/value pair. For example, "Apple" is the key that contains the value "iOS".

Unlike arrays, the ordering of items in a dictionary is not important. This is because an item is identified by the key and not the index. The above could also be written like this:

var platforms = [

    "Microsoft" : "Windows Phone",

    "Google" : "Android",

    "Apple": "iOS"

]

The key of an item in a dictionary is not limited to String - it can be any of the hashable type (i.e. it must be uniquely representable). Th following example shows a dictionary using integer as its key:

var ranking = [

    1: "Gold",

    2: "Silver",

    3: "Bronze"

]

To access an item in a dictionary, specify its key:

let platform = platforms["Apple"]     // "iOS"

To know the number of items within a dictionary, use the count property:

var platformsCount = platforms.count  // 3

To replace the value of an item, specify its key and assign a value to it:

platforms["Microsoft"] = "WinPhone"

To remove an item from a dictionary, you can simply set it to nil:

platforms["Microsoft"] = nil;

platformsCount = platforms.count      // 2

The number of items inside the dictionary would now be reduced by one.

To insert a new item into the dictionary, you specify a new key and assign it a value, like this:

platforms["Samsung"] = "Tizen"

The value of a key can itself be another array as the following example shows:

var products = [

    platforms["Apple"]: ["iPhone", "iPad", "iPod touch"],

    platforms["Google"]: ["Nexus 3", "Nexus 4", "Nexus 5"],

    platforms["Microsoft"] : ["Lumia 920", "Lumia 1320","Lumia 1520"]

]

To access a particular product in the above example, you would first specify the key of the item you want to retrieve, followed by the index of the array, like this:

var product1 = products["Apple"][0]

Mutabilities of Dictionaries

When creating a dictionary, its mutability (its ability to change its size after it has been created) is dependent of you using either the let or var keyword. If you used the let keyword, the dictionary is immutable (its size cannot be changed after it has been created) as you are creating a constant. If you used the var keyword, the dictionary is mutable (its size can be changed after its creation) as you are now creating a variable.

See Also
Arrays