Building Apps In Swift With Storyboards

Nerval's Lobster writes Apple touts the Swift programming language as easy to use, thanks in large part to features such as Interface Builder, a visual designer provided in Xcode that allows a developer to visually design storyboards. In theory, this simplifies the process of designing both screens and the connections between screens, as it needs no code and offers an easy-to-read visual map of an app's navigation. But is Swift really so easy (or at least as easy as anything else in a developer's workflow)? This new walkthrough of Interface Builder (via Dice) shows that it's indeed simple to build an app with these custom tools... so long as the app itself is simple. Development novices who were hoping that Apple had created a way to build complex apps with a limited amount of actual coding might have to spend a bit more time learning the basics before embarking on the big project of their dreams.

Comments

Swift is MIA in TFA

[OzPeter]

Where in TFA is Swift actually used? All I see is a simple Interface Builder example which has nothing do with Swift.

Are we going to be continually with crappy iOS articles repeating the basics of UI development just because they have the word "Swift" in them or that they are Dice based??

And another crappy article .. with Swift

Crappy articles are crappy articles and articles like these are the reason that Netcraft confirms that /. is dying.

Re:Swift is MIA in TFA

[jandrese]

Hypercard is owned by a third party now, and they do offer phone targets for the stacks.

It's kind of a shame. Hypercard was incredibly close to being a modern web browser before web browsers were invented. All it needed was a way to remotely load pages from a stack over your Appletalk network. Javascript might never have been born since HyperTalk would already be doing the job. People would eventually have to address the grave security concerns, but in the early 90s nobody gave a crap about security on home networks. Of course being a Mac only product would also put a serious crimp in widespread adoption (especially since this is the era where Jobs is at Pixar and NeXT so Apple is floundering badly).

Re:The complexity has to go somewhere

[blue9steel]

The dream of some fancy tool that builds a complex app for you (since you're an "ideas person", not a programmer) is always going to be a fantasy.

Always is a long time. Try these statements on for size as a comparison:

"I also lay aside all ideas of any new works or engines of war, the invention of which long-ago reached its limit, and in which I see no hope for further improvement..." - Sextus Julius Frontinus 84 C.E.

"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?" - The Quarterly Review 1825

"The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it... Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient." - Dr. Alfred Velpeau 1839

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -Lord Kelvin 1895

"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Albert Einstein, 1932.

Consider if you will:

An assembler is a way of automatically creating machine code

A compiler is a way of automatically creating assembly code

A ______ is a way of automatically creating program code

Is there some reason we shouldn't expect the blank to be filled in and efforts to move up the stack yet again? As computers become more powerful we can afford ever more complex layers of abstraction.