Continuing my series exploring the Swift language from the perspective of a C# developer, I left off with some strange syntax in Swift involving lot's of !? intermingled with some expressions. What is this excessive use of punctuation and why is it there? For instance: let awesomeConstant: String? = "I have no purpose" print(awesomeConsta…
Don Fitzsimmons
Over the past few months, I've gotten deep into learning and using Xamarin and I have really grown to like it. One of the biggest gripes developers have with Xamarin is the cost for licensing. Once Microsoft acquired Xamarin, we all knew some good news was just around the corner and mostly because it's in Microsoft's interest to get Xamar…
Don Fitzsimmons
Here we go. The learning process with most languages begins with learning about variables. Swift tutorials are no different. But, before I started learning about these fundamental concepts, I needed to be able to run code samples. If you're running a Mac, you can simply download Xcode and start a new "Playground". A Playground is a specia…
Don Fitzsimmons
I often rely on the kindness of other developers to write helpful articles on the use of various APIs or frameworks. You know, Google something like "AVAudioSession ducking not working". Most often, you come to a series of Stack Overflow posts, which is great, but the holy grail of Google searching for a very specific problem is a blog po…
Don Fitzsimmons
For the past few weeks, I've been building an app in my spare time. This app, it's for local gym and it's really just a highly customized HIIT/Tabata timer used to run group workouts. It has to run on iOS. Now, I'm not an iOS developer. In the past, I did write a Windows Phone app, but nothing for iOS. This would begin my adventure into t…
Don Fitzsimmons