It seems that there are varied opinions of how quickly is Apple’s Swift getting adopted, and whether it will finally make its way through in 2015. In any case, there is no shortage of developers who are learning the new language, and there are plenty of applications being built that not only change the way we do things, but also manage to turn profit for themselves.
The Swift development course that we covered a few months ago, has now been enrolled by over 50,000 students on Udemy, a ratio that many instructors and developer teams would simply die for. It goes to show how much potential there is for teaching and educating people on this language.
But, if you prefer to learn for free, check out our post about great Swift communities to be a part of, it’s always nice to learn from those who’re on the same page as we are, and communities are also great for amplifying our own learning process.
Lets take a look at some cool iOS apps that we can play around with instantly.
1. 2048 for Swift
2048 was a huge hit in 2014, and many developers tried (and succeeded) to adapt this popular game to their own favorite programming language, and Swift was no exception. You will need the Xcode 6 Developer Preview to build and run the project. However, it should run under either iOS 7 or iOS 8 (on the simulator).
2. Open-Source Native iPhone Messages App for Swift
Acani Chats is a very simple and elegant chatting application from which you can both learn and explore the syntax that is necessary to build such applications. It supports simple things like contact avatars, and the modern iOS user interface.
3. Edhita
This is a very simple and tiny open-source text editor for iOS users. (duh!) The editor supports the basic functions such as the management of files and directories, downloading of files, even sending files by email. It supports markdown, and you can even preview your markdown built files instantly. Neat and tidy.
Check Out: – Best Ways to Improve iOS Mobile App User Engagement
4. Hacker News Reader iOS app using Swift
There is no shortage of apps out there that act as Hacker News alternative readers, we ourselves have covered those extensively. This Hacker News Reader built with Swift is no exception, it provides a nice and seamless user interface that allows to view newest, latest and most liked stories, as well as gives you the ability to read content directly from within the application.
5. iContactU
Have you ever forgotten to call/contact someone that you were meant to? Our guess is that more often than once!
iContactU will enable you to create a list of people to contact for your own specific reason, at a given date and given time. Then the app will order all your reminders by date, and will alert you with a notification (and a badge) at day and time you’ve set: for an Account or a Project Manager could be a life saver…
6. SwiftFlickrApp
Are you a photographer, or just someone who likes to explore photos for inspiration and ideas? This is a great demo application to play around with. The SwiftFlickrApp will enable you to browse the most popular Flickr photos from within one single interface. You can view photos as a grid, as a list, and you can also zoom-in on any photos you like. Will give you some ideas and insights on how to use UICollectionView and AFNetworking.
7. Swift Weather
The good news is that this is a full-scale weather app that provides functionality for iPhone 4(s), iPhone 5(s), iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. It’s also integrated with Today Widgets, so it’s definitely an app you want to check out to learn more about the ins and outs of these types of apps.
Conclusion: –
Swift is still a very new language, and it will take some time for it to mature and really reach out to the enormous thousands of developers out there, but there are already plenty of bright minds covering in great detail – what Apple should do to improve Swift, and also what are the current advantages and disadvantages of using this language for App development.
If you’re a Swift developer and have open-sourced your own code, then please do share it with us in the comment section so that we may add it to this article, and also to explore your ideas and creativity. Let us know in the comments.
Photo by Gawker Media
