Karl Oscar Weber

WWDC 2014

There were a lot of reveals in this years WWDC keynote. It was crazy. They just announced hundreds of new technologies for developers that open up whole new possibilities. There are too many features and apis to talk about. Routinely, Apple adds popular features and services that other companies have been offering for years, albeit with an apple twist. There was much of that as well.

Swift

Apple just announced a new programming language named Swift. Swift is envisioned to make developing for Apple platforms easier, less error prone, and more awesome. It is very awesome.

This is what it looks like:

var myVariable = 42
let myConstant = 42

The crazy thing is that Swift, right now, is 100% compatible with current Cocoa APIs. In fact you can mix C, Objective-C, and Swift together like a smoothie. This magic is achieved by the new and improved LLVM Compiler that apple is using, It can distinguish between Swift and Objective-C and compile it accordingly.
Swift Syntax is reminiscent of Javascript without the semicolons. variable & object type is implicitely inferred by the first value, and only explicetly inferred if you choose by using a colon ( : ) and then the type Double after the identifier.

var myInteger = 42
var myDouble  = 70.0
let myExplicitDouble: Double = 40

very cool.

The new Xcode also comes with Playground. The only way to describe it is a Swift Live Coding Environment. The best of Xcode's autocompletion with an engine that displays the result of each line of code.

Learning Swift is ridiculously easy. My Sister who has less than a week of programming experience was writing confident code in less than an hour. With Swift App development has never been easier.

CloudKit

Writing a server system for your app takes time. Modern web Apps aren't easy. With Cloudkit Apple is letting developers use iCloud to store all their Data, images, databases, user accounts, everything. It will handle Notifications, syncing, Distribution, everything for free. They are giving away 1PB of storage per app to developers. That's a Petabyte! That's a crazy amount of storage. You can imagine CloudKit as a Parse competitor.

I don't believe that App developers will forgoe writing their own server code completely with CloudKit around. I forsee more of a Hybrid approach with apps building on Cloudkit to validate Ideas, and Migrating to a custom solution when growth and performance demand it. Cloudkit really is great for everyone.

There were many more things revealed in the WWDC Keynote, too many to name here, So I'll leave that up to you to find out. It's no lie that this release of iOS is going to be the biggest since the app store almost 7 years ago. That's a crazy amount of time when you think about it. These technologies are making it easier than ever to make powerful software, and that's the point.