iOS Game Dev Cookbook

Our latest book is the iOS Swift Game Development Cookbook

Also available via O’Reilly’s Safari, if you have a subscription (a free trial is available!)

/dev/world/2018 CFP extended!

By popular demand, we’ve extended the /dev/world/2018 call for presenters by one week, to 22 May 2018! Get your talks in! You will be amazing!

/dev/world/2018

The iOS, macOS, Swift, and general Apple development conference that I help run, /dev/world is looking for presenters! We’ve opened the CFP for our 11th event (we’ve been going for 11 years! That’s nuts!) and we’re very excited.

If you have a good idea for a talk, please send it our way! I might wear my space suit again.

Latest Swift book: Learning Swift

Learning Swift (3rd edition), my latest book on Swift, covering Swift 4 and beyond, is available now. Check it out on Safari, or from your favourite retailer of books.

Advanced iOS 11 + Swift 4 online training [September 2017]

The registration period for this training has now passed! Follow me on Twitter, or check back here to keep up to date with future training.

Included with your Safari subscription (or free trial!)i

New content! Videos! Books!

We’ve been working with some awesome folks to build a great library of training material for game development with Unity.

These videos are designed to accompany and support our upcoming book, Mobile Game Development with Unity (also on Amazon and Safari).

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

Designing Games that People Want to Play (on Safari)
Getting Started with Game Development in Unity (on Safari)
Developing 3D Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating 2D Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating First-Person-Shooter (FPS) Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating 3D VR Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating Narrative Games with Unity (on Safari)
Just Enough Game Art (on Safari)
Getting Your Game Out There (on Safari)

If there’s no purchase available yet, there will be soon! Everything is available on Safari right now, though.

We’ve also got some new “Learning Path” videos, exclusively out on O’Reilly’s Safari platform:

Our newest books are also available now:

Learning Swift (on the latest Swift/iOS/macOS)
(also on Amazon and Safari)
The Kerbal Player’s Guide
(also on Amazon and Safari)
- Check out our talk “The Mun and Back”, from OSCON 2015 as well!

One of the best ways to look at all the training we write is on O’Reilly’s Safari platform (which has a free trial). It’s like Netflix for technical training and books.

What’s New in Swift 3

Tim, Jon, and I have been working with O’Reilly Media on a free report covering the latest version of Apple’s programming language, Swift 3.

You can download it, for free, over at the O’Reilly website. The report covers:

a high-level view of Swift 3’s changes and new features, and learn how this version differs from Swift 2
the Swift Evolution Process and the full list of accepted proposals—including those not yet implemented
Swift 3’s changes to the language’s syntax, standard library features, and other areas
Swift 3’s use on the server, and use a simple program to learn about Swift’s use on Linux
further resources for learning about, working with, and converting projects to Swift 3

Swift for Linux, on a Mac

This is what a computer linux hacker looks like.

I’ve been working with Swift for Linux, as part of a bunch of teaching material, as well as some conference talks that we’re working on. It’s not super easy to figure out, from searching, the best way to install Swift and Linux, if you’re a Mac user who wants to have a go with it. Here’s what I’ve found.

As it turns out, after extensive research, my feeling is that the best way to run Swift on Linux (on a Mac) is using Vagrant and VirtualBox. I’ve looked at a variety of options, including setting it up manually in a VM, using Docker for Mac, and so on, but this turned out to be the easiest way to do it, and maintain it.

To get Swift on Linux running, on your Mac:

Download and install VirtualBox.
Download and install Vagrant.
Make sure you have Git installed, and clone the following repository: https://github.com/IBM-Swift/vagrant-ubuntu-swift-dev.git
Once you’ve cloned the repository, change directory into it: vagrant-ubuntu-swift-dev
Run the command: vagrant up
Wait. The vagrantfile included in the repository you cloned, which tells Vagrant what to do, downloads Ubuntu 15.10, the Swift prerequisites, the prerequisites for libdispatch, the Swift concurrency library, the Sphinx documentation system, and then clones the Swift repository and creates a script that allows you to build Swift. (This might take a while, and will download a few gigabytes of stuff.)
Once Vagrant is done, you can run the following command to connect to the Linux installation: vagrant ssh
Then, once in Linux, run the following script to build Swift: /vagrant/swift-dev/swift/utils/build-script (This might also take a while, depending on the speed/capabilities of your computer.)
You can then run the following command to verify Swift is up and running: swift –version
You can then create some .swift files, and compile them with the swiftc command.

Easy! Hope that was helpful to someone.

Melbourne iOS Developer Training

We’ll be running our fantastic 2-day iOS developer training in Melbourne next month! Join us on the 2nd and 3rd of May, and learn all you need to know for iOS development. Only a few tickets left! Everyone gets an electronic copy of our new book, Learning Swift. Email me if you have any questions.

Secret Lab Developer Training

iOS Developer Training in Melbourne

Hello! We’re running our famous iOS Developer Training again in Melbourne, on May 2 and May 3 this year. We’ll be teaching the latest iOS app development techniques, with Swift. We’re taking expressions of interest, which require no commitment, and will get you a discount code for when registrations actually open! If you have any questions, feel free to email me. Check it, and register your interest, over at the Secret Lab site: http://www.secretlab.com.au/training/ios-mel-2016