Regular visitors to the ShinobiControls blog may well remember a flurry of activity in September of last year, coinciding with the release of iOS7. iOS7 Day-by-Day was a daily blog series, which took a look at some of the new features available to developers in iOS7, with easily-understandable sample projects demonstrating how to use them. In fact, you can still read last year's series on the blog or in a free ebook.
Nearly a year has passed, and in June at WWDC, Apple unveiled iOS8 to developers. iOS8 is jam-packed with fantastic new APIs, technologies and frameworks, offering untold possibilities to developers. With this in mind it gives me great pleasure to announce that over the coming weeks and months we'll have a new blog series - the somewhat originally titled "iOS8 Day-by-Day". We'll kick off properly next week, but check back later this week for an intro to Swift post.
iOS8 Day-by-Day will cover the most significant of the new features available to developers in iOS8. The posts aren't meant to be back-to-basics tutorials, but rather a review of the new capabilities and APIs. Every post will have a sample application or playground which enables the reader to see the new features in action - something that you can't get from documentation.
Last year, Apple's NDA provided a buffer to write a load of blog posts in advance. This year, there is no such luxury - we're starting the series before iOS8 is on general release. iOS8 Day-by-Day will kick-off with a few weeks of daily posts in the same style of iOS7 Day-by-Day. After this point the frequency is likely to reduce a little - if this upsets you then please accept my apologies.
If I gave you the full list, then it would spoil the surprise of finding out each time a new article is posted. However, I can reveal that the series will cover topics such as:
- Improvements to unit testing
- New frameworks such as HealthKit
- Adaptive UI
- Building extensions
- Some less-obvious parts of the platform
- more...
Here's an index of all the posts that have been published so far:
INDEX HERE
This will automatically update as new posts are published.
We've set up an email list that you can subscribe to. Every time a new article in the series is posted we'll send out a short email. Hit the following button to subscribe:
We'll also mention it on twitter: @shinobicontrols, and on Google+ - you should follow us to stay informed.
Yes. Although Apple didn't suggest that objC will be going anywhere, Swift is very much the way forward. Don't let this put you off though. The code I'll be writing will all be easy to follow - and fairly trivial to translate back in to objective C, should you wish to. Swift has a lot of incredibly powerful features, but they won't be the topic of this blog series.
To help you get up to speed, I'll write a short "intro to Swift" blog post as the first article. This will aim to give you just enough info to follow any sample code in the following blog posts.
Every single post will have an accompanying project, or playground. This is one of the fantastic features of iOS8 Day-by-Day - not only do you read about the new features, but you can actually see them in action.
Each time a new article is posted, the related code will be pushed to the github repo at github.com/ShinobiControls/iOS8-day-by-day
Well, maybe. Let me know what it is - I'm @iwantmyrealname on twitter. If I don't have plans for it and I reckon it's cool then I'll have a crack at fitting it in.
The one area I won't write about is games - and that's because I don't know anything about them. Sorry.
Please do! Tweet with the hashtag #iOS8DayByDay. The more people that read and comment about the series, the more articles I'm likely to write :)
Thanks for reading - I hope you enjoy reading the series as much as I enjoy writing it!
sam