We’ve choosen to write our application in Swift. How will we fare?
I’ve had some interest in mobile software development since taking the course here at OSU. I think that was in part fueled by the fact that I didn’t have to deal with HTML5, CSS, and Javascript (although I really don’t dislike JS unlike a lot of developers that swear off web development). Luckily for this project, I was able to group up with a couple other students that were interested in creating a mobile app.
Our project requires us to create a crowdsourced bike-sharing app that allows users to add their own bikes into the database for people to use. We had two choices in mind for technologies we could use. First was Flutter, a framework written in Dart that we all had experience with from CS492. The second was Swift.
Swift is a language I had been interested in for a while but hadn’t brought myself to learn it yet and while Flutter’s potential seems high due to the ability to create cross-platform applications many of the jobs on the market are skewed toward native iOS and android jobs. Since one of our group members had some experience with Swift, and we were all keen on learning for potential job opportunities, we decided on Swift.
I was able to play around with Xcode and create a simple tip calculator app. Here are my first impressions. I found it interesting to use the storyboard and to add objects (such as text boxes, labels, buttons, etc) to the storyboard directly. Additionally, I found it to be a bit different from Flutter or traditional web development that you would connect your storyboard elements to the view controller and then write your logic there. I think it is helpful to me and user-friendly to see all the elements in the UI and directly link them. I do wish that like Flutter, there was a hot reload option. I did find the syntax to be somewhat like Python but also somewhat like Javascript as well. It is interesting that in Swift, let is for immutable variables while var is for mutable variables which could be a little bit confusing at first coming from Javascript.
I am excited to be able to use Swift for our project. I am glad to have a teammate that has some experience with Swift since it means that we aren’t all walking in the dark. Hopefully this quarter I’ll be able to have fun with the project and learning Swift~
