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Swift Kick

Swift roundup: Game programming!

Today’s Swift Kick features a roundup of tutorials and resources for the Swift developer who’s into game programming. If you’ve been meaning to learn Swift, games are a fun way to do so, and if you’ve been meaning to learn game programming, you’ll find these useful! Brian Advent’s tutorial on building a networked tic-tac-toe game […]

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Swift Kick

Swift/iOS developer tutorials of note

Even though the new iOS and new iPhones have finally been released, it’s still the early days of the iOS 8/Swift era. The language is still evolving, people are still trying to figure out how to best make use of its features, and there are no veterans. It’s not too late for you to get started with iOS […]

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Swift Kick

A simple “shoot-em-up” game with Sprite Kit and Swift, part one: Last things first – the complete project

In case you were wondering: yes, this code has been updated so that it’s compatible with the iOS APIs that came after the XCode 6 beta period. Here’s a fun programming exercise that you might want to try if you’ve been meaning to learn both Swift and game development for iOS: building a simple “shoot […]

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Swift Kick

You can use Swift’s “private” access modifier to limit the reach of overrides and extensions, but not monkeypatches

What happens when you mark operator overload definitions as private? While I was translating the code in the RayWenderlich.com article Sprite Kit Tutorial for Beginners from its original Objective-C to Swift, I got to the point where he provides some routines to do vector math on CGPoints. These are “standalone” utility functions and aren’t methods inside any […]

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Swift Kick

Swift Kick: Variables, constants, simple functions, and basic types in the Swift programming language

Let’s dive into Swift! For the next several articles, I’m going to share my observations as I noodle around with Swift on the Xcode 6 beta and try to get a feel for the language. Keep in mind that Swift is in beta, and given the loose way “beta” is defined in these agile, pivot-happy […]

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Swift Kick

Swift Kick: Resources for getting started with the Swift programming language

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, chances are that you’re itching to take Apple’s new programming language, Swift, out for a spin. Global Nerdy’s largely about mobile technology these days, and since I’m looking to make it more about mobile development as well, I thought “Hey, here’s a great opportunity to write about […]

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iOS developer roundup: Learning Grand Central Dispatch, avoiding the Staircase of Doom, looking at AVSpeechSynthesizer and NSURL / NSURLComponents

I’ve been meaning to get back to regularly featuring articles on programming, and there’s no better time than the present! Global Nerdy will feature a regular category of articles called “Vaya con iOS” (a play on the Spanish blessing, vaya con Dios), which will be about various aspects of iOS development. There’ll also be an […]