53: Too Much Syntax

While Ben is at NSConference, Jake and Jelly compensate by talking about the new Macbook, Jake’s recent experience with converting a Swift 1.0 project to 1.2, and a couple of Haneke-related tricks they’ve learned recently. Jake wants the world to know about the one thing he managed to predict correctly for the Apple Event: the inclusion of hardware other than the Apple Watch. This leads to talking about the new Macbook as a development machine, despite the slower compile times as compared to a Macbook Pro. This starts to lead into a discussion about Swift 1.2, which apparently has far improved compile times than the previous version. First of all, however, Jake lays some groundwork by detailing some bugs he fixed in an update for the app he talked about on the last episode, including the parental section accessibility issue and the solution he devised. Jake then finally gets to the details of his migration of the app’s codebase to Swift 1.2, including the changes to the as operator, and the changes to @autoclosure. This procedure has made him question Swift’s simplicity, however, and he wonders if it will be a language that is easy for newcomers to pick up, or whether Objective-C might be the better choice. The migration has also introduced him to forking an open source repository to contribute changes, and he details the changes he made for a page control alternative and how he made it compatible with Voiceover. Finally allowed to talk about some of his work, Jelly takes the mention of Haneke as an opportunity to talk a little about custom fetchers, and Jake then talks about implementing custom formats with the caching library.