This repository holds some demo code I used to give a very condensed intro into the Swift programming language and iOS programming. This was basically a talk for a "Dev-Friday" session at work.
I do not provide all materials to hold such a talk here (no presentation slides or presenter notes) as I mostly do these things on the fly. Instead, this is basically a collection of code I slowly "unveiled" piece-wise to explain some concepts.
The repo basically contains three things:
Gibberish.xcodeprojandGibberish.xcworkplace: A complete, small iOS app to illustrate loading data from a URL and displaying it in a SwiftUI driven user interface.GibberishFirstDemoMaster.playground: A playground "master file", see below.listElement.phpandlistElement.yaml. The PHP file used for the API from the example code and its OpenAPI specification.
The idea of the intro was the following:
I opened a new Swift playground first to show in screen and explain some very basic things.
Then I copied parts of the GibberishFirstDemoMaster.playground file (which I had on a secondary screen) over to the new playground and demonstrate what the new code does.
I mostly followed the pragma marks and comments from the "master playground", but not 100%.
Note that after a very brief syntax description (the target audience was developers, so I assumed knowledge of loops, ifs and so on) I began showing the power of extensions before detailing out more classical OOP concepts.
The reason for that was that I wanted to put a focus on protocol-oriented programming, an important concept in Swift that in a way deviates from more traditional OOP concepts in some aspects.
Once all that code was demonstrated and explained (which included some breaks, btw), I showed the actual iOS project, i.e. Gibberish.xcodeproj (the workspace was just included for convenience, there's nothing else in it).
The rationale behind that was to show simpler Swift code first and not start with SwiftUI, which, being a DSL, is confusing for people unfamiliar with the basic language.
The listElement.php currently runs on my webspace (i.e. the URL in the demo code still works as I am writing this), but I might eventually remove it.
For this reason I included the code that drives the API in here as well.
Excuse anything egregious in terms of PHP, I virtually never programmed in that language (and I have "opinions" on it...).
For the demo it works well enough I'd say.
I also included a short spec to explain how it works in listElement.yaml.
To actually generate the random gibberish the API delivers I used another API, https://www.randomtext.me/, by Dale Davies. Thanks!
Unfortunately Dale's API seems to no longer work, so I switched to Dino Ipsum. That had the best fit for me, although "Gibberish" now seems a bit odd, considering the text I provide is exclusively dinosaur names. Oh well, it's fun and still serves its purpose. 😃
If this is the first time you play around with Swift and iOS (and Xcode) I should probably include a word about code signing here.
As Gibberish.xcodeproj is an iOS project and can theoretically run on a device it has code signing activated.
The development team is currently set to my personal team and, surprise, surprise, you will not be a part of that.
That means depending on what you do with the demo code, you might have to change that.
To do so, in Xcode, select the Gibberish.xcodeproj in the Project Navigator (the left side bar), then select the 'Gibberish' target and then the 'Signing & Capabilities' tab.
There you can change the team to your own personal one.
To get such a team you need to have an Apple developer acccount (i.e. an Apple ID that you use to log in here. You do NOT have to be enroled in the 100 $/year Developer program!
- First and foremost, there is obviously https://swift.org.
- Also check out Apple's Start Developing iOS Apps (Swift) (I hope the link won't change...). It's small steps also for non-developers, but they do a great job so far I think.
- If you are interested in protocol-oroented programming and value types vs reference types I highly recommend these two WWDC talks (in that order): Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift and Building Better Apps with Value Types in Swift (note: this video has strangely disappeared from Apple's own site, so this is a web-archive link. You can download it from there, live watching is too slow, though).