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Ask Slashdot: Objective C Vs. Swift For a New iOS Developer?
RegularDave writes: I'm a recent grad from a master's program in a potentially worthless social science field, and I've considered getting into iOS development. Several of my friends who were in similar situations after grad school have done so and are making a healthy living getting contract work. Although they had CS and Physics degrees going into iOS, neither had worked in objective C and both essentially went through a crash courses (either self-taught or through intensive classes) in order to get their first gigs. I have two questions. First, am I an idiot for thinking I can teach myself either objective C or Swift on my own without any academic CS background (I've tinkered in HTML, CSS, and C classes online with some success)? Second, if I'm not an idiot for attempting to learn either language, which should I concentrate on?
How many times are the slashbots going to post this same stupid question?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You don't need a professor to teach you how to program. Most of us who started using computers in the 70's and 80's were hobbyists, and we were self taught before going to college for CS. I don't use either one, so I'm not an expert, but in the immortal words of Yogi Berra - "when you come to a fork in the road, take it".
It will only take you 20-30 hours each to learn the basics of the language, so try both, and at some point you'll gravitate towards one.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
It's better to try and fail than never try at all.
But since you have very little experience programming in any language, you're going to have to do a lot of learning and you're going to have to get a lot of help.
Objective-C has been around a lot longer; there will be more people available to help and there will be more books, tutorials and example code.
Considering there is a large and valuable legacy code base, it's going to be around for quite some time to come.
Languages aren't that difficult to switch, assuming you're familiar with the paradigm (procedural, object-oriented, functional).
API's are the hard part, but they'll be pretty similar between Objective-C and Swift.
By the time you're proficient with Objective-C, switching to Swift (if necessary) should take just a couple of months at the very worst.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
.NET with Xamarin is one of the better development/cross platform options for mobile development, the fact you dismiss it so quickly shows a great deal of ignorance on your part.
There are some good things about the iOS ecosystem. For starters, if you require the latest iOS version, the piracy rate for apps will be at 0%. If you allow multiple iOS versions, just do a write or read outside your app's sandbox to check for a JB or not. Android has a non-zero piracy rate, but LVL and device-based APK encryption do reduce it to a dull roar.
You can still earn money as a developer. However, you can't follow the herd. If everyone is making fart apps, don't waste the time in making one.
Find a market segment and go with that. For example, Torque is an app that makes a lot of money. It isn't mainstream, but for the task at hand, it is extremely useful, and people will pay for it.
Some ideas/suggestions of what to do:
1: Make a GOOD PGP/gpg program. One that not just does the usual signing/encrypting/validating/decrypting, but uses the operating system's encryption (KeyChain) to stash the private keys. Coupled with an optional passphrase, this provides good protection.
2: Make a utility that can store files on multiple cloud providers at once. That way, if I stash documents and some sync error trashes one provider, I still have the documents saved somewhere else. If there are sync mismatches, give the user the option of using the document with the latest timestamp with saving the old one in an archive directory to be safe.
3: Create an app that is based on option #2, but also encrypts and presents itself as a WebDAV option. This way, one can use their phone as a drag and drop cloud storage device, with the app doing the backend encryption and distributed storage work.
4: A statistical analyzer similar to Minitab or SAS, but scaled down to a device.
5: A device that does TKIP/SKIP authentication like Google's Authenticator, but can use TouchID on iOS, a PIN/passphrase on iOS/Android, and can back the seeds up securely. This way, if I re-ROM my phone, I don't have to redo all my 2FA stuff... just re-import an encrypted backup and be back and running. With the option of a PIN, even if the device is stolen, one's 2FA IDs are still protected.