Why Learn Swift?

Code School has quite a few iOS courses to learn Objective-C, and while we’re expecting Objective-C to be around for a long time, even Apple now recommends Swift to anyone just starting out with iOS development. And that is why we’re excited to announce that we now teach the basics of iOS development with Swift at Code School in our new course, App Evolution With Swift! In this course, you’ll learn how to build your first simple app with Swift that contains text, images, buttons, and table views. You’ll also learn how to structure data in your app so that you can display a list of items and tap on one to show more detail. It’s a great way to get started as an iOS app developer.

But let’s say you don’t want a career as an app developer — what good is learning Swift then?  Even if you don’t want to work on or sell your own apps in the App Store, there’s still a lot of satisfaction in being able to write your own apps for personal use. So today I want to share a few ideas for apps you could try to make.

1. Grocery List App

Many people who own a smartphone use it to take notes, and often times they’ll make a list of what they need to buy at the grocery store. One disadvantage of using the built-in Notes app, though, is that as you check off or delete items when you put them in your cart, they’re gone forever. Why not build a simple app where you input all of the things you would ever buy at the store once, and then you can just create a copy of that list for each trip? You could even add some checkboxes next to each item so that you could mark it off as you went down the list, without having to lose it for the next time you have to make a grocery run!

2. Photo Tagger

The built-in Photos app is great, but wouldn’t it be even better if you could store notes about your photos? With Swift, you can build an app that reads in all of the photos from your camera roll and presents a detail view for each photo when you tap it from the main list. And while you’re within that detail view, you could add some text fields to enter your own notes. If you were feeling even more inspired, you could try to add the ability to share photos via SMS, email, or social media sites.

3. Open Source

Just a few weeks ago, on December 3, 2015, Apple completely open-sourced Swift with libraries that can run on OS X and Linux. It’s still early, but it’s likely that the Swift language will become used for more than just iOS and OS X development now, and soon you may even be able to use Swift to work with web applications, data science applications, and more. Being able to learn one language and use it in multiple places can reduce the overhead of having to learn and maintain your knowledge of many different languages, so learning Swift now could be a great investment in your future as a programmer.

Ready to start making your own apps? Head over to our new Swift course, App Evolution With Swift, to start learning how to build iOS apps with Swift, and let us know what you think of Swift.