Kevin Mcneish

Author Details

Kevin McNeish

Kevin McNeish is author of the new book “Learn to Code in Swift” as well as the “iOS App Development for Non-Programmers” book series (www.iOSAppsForNonProgrammers.com), winner of the Publishing Innovation Award. Kevin is also an award-winning app developer, software architect, and conference speaker in the U.S. and abroad. He has spent much of his career making difficult concepts easy to understand. Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kjmcneish.

Swift Programming 101: Demystifying Swift's Initializers (Part 2)

By Kevin McNeish

In this second part of my two-part post on Demystifying Swift's Initializers, I explain the concepts of initializer chaining, two-phase initialization, and initializer inheritance using hands-on examples that walk you through some of these deeper concepts. You can read part 1 of this post at this link.

If you would like to follow along and perform the step-by-step instructions with this post (highly recommended) you can download the project we have completed so far at this link.

Swift 101: Demystifying Swift's Initializers (Part 1)

By Kevin McNeish

Now that Apple has officially released Xcode 6 and the NDA has been lifted, it's time to dive deeper into Swift—Apple's new language for building iOS apps. Learning how to properly use initializers in Swift can be daunting at first. Swift's requirement that all stored properties in a class are initialized adds complexity to the initialization process. In the first part of this two-part post I'm going to demystify initializers as I provide a hands-on approach to learning how to best implement initializers in your custom classes.

Developing Next-Generation Apps for the Apple Watch

By Kevin McNeish

The word is out! The new Apple Watch is coming your way in early 2015, providing a brand new platform and great opportunities for a new category of apps. In this post I'll cover some of the basic features available for app developers so you can begin thinking about how these features can be put to use in your own custom apps.

Swift 101 - Working with Swift's New Optional Values

By Kevin McNeish

The Swift programming language has a new feature called optionals that were not previously available in Objective-C. They are similar to optional types in Java and nullable types in the C# programming language.

Swift 101 - Swift Meets the Cocoa Touch Framework

By Kevin McNeish

Even though Apple has provided the new Swift programming language for building iOS apps, one thing remains the same—we still use the Cocoa Touch Framework libraries to build iOS functionality into our apps. However, since the Cocoa Touch Framework is written in Objective-C, how is this accomplished? In this article I'll show you the mechanics behind how Swift accesses Objective-C code, and how the Cocoa Touch APIs (application programming interfaces) change when you access them from Swift.

Swift 101 - New, Powerful Enumerations

By Kevin McNeish

In this post, I'm going to demonstrate some of the powerful new features of enumerations in Swift.

Declaring Swift Enumerations

Just about every programming language has the concept of enumerations. An enumeration allows you to group a set of related constants together. It contains a complete list of all the possible values for a given type.

Swift 101 - Classes, Variables, Properties & Methods

By Kevin McNeish

As promised, here is my first installment on learning to program in the new Swift language!

Defining Classes in Swift

The following code shows an example of a Swift class definition:

Declare a class

To declare a class in Swift, you use the class keyword followed by the name of the class. If it has a superclass, you add a colon and the name of the superclass. The beginning and end of the class are indicated by the opening and closing curly braces.

8 Reasons Swift is Easier to Learn & Use than Objective-C

By Kevin McNeish

Over the years I have literally taught tens of thousands of people how to write code in Objective-C through training classes, conferences, online forums, and my book series. Based on the mountain of feedback I have received, I can tell you some key points that make Swift much easier to learn than Objective-C.

If Objective-C is the only language you have ever coded in, I have one thing to say about moving to Swift. Welcome to the 21st century.

Apple Loosens up its NDA for iOS 8, OS X, and Xcode

By Kevin McNeish

Apple, notorious for its secrecy, has loosened up its restrictive NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) for the beta versions of iOS 8, OS X, and Xcode 6. In the latest version of the iOS Developer Program License Agreement, they have added the following statement in the Confidentiality section under the topic 10.1 Information Deemed Apple Confidential:

The iOS 8 Sky is Falling - What Should Developers Do?

By Kevin McNeish

So the word is out. iOS 8, Xcode 6 and the new Swift programming language are headed your way. What should you do? Should you continue to learn iOS 7 and Objective-C or should you make the switch to iOS 8 and Swift programming? I've already had several emails and tweets asking about this as iOS developers ponder this important question.