Swift 2.0 and the updates to iOS Content

Well, forget about Parse... :-/

Thanks for the update..

Release less => Wait more => Pay more ($$$) But those courses are still the best I could find on the internet... so I'm still waiting! :-/

More like I'm the only person on the team making Swift content -> Swift is always changing (2.2 releases next month. Version 3 in September) -> + general delays. I should point out that all this stuff is new to us as well you know. Apple doesn't train us in Swift or anything and it takes a tiny bit of time to do some extra research.

Rudy's decision is fair. Many parts of the Swift 1 track aren't very different so taking content there should help you learn more. The delay right now is because I introduced a few more courses + reordered things in the list above based on the latest things I learned about Swift. We'll be introducing a few topics earlier than we planned on but I think in the long run (or at least until Swift 3 is out), it will be better for students.

I am extremely ignorant and I have no idea why I'm learning what I'm learning.

Trust that we will get you there :) In all honesty, it's hard to offer practical examples for basic language constructs. That's akin to asking to show how nails are used in the building of a space shuttle.

It's normal to be confused at first, but as you go along you will get more comfortable with how things come together. By the time you get to the Build an iPhone app course you will have a good idea of how all these things come together.

Keep in mind that if you were to go to school for this kind of knowledge, you're required to take 2 - 4 years worth of time, classes, homework and projects to understand it all. We attempt to do that much sooner but still, you cannot get the "whole picture" after 1 or 2 courses.

There's a reason iOS developers are paid really well. It takes time to accumulate skills.

I'm not 100% sure if I am allowed to do this on this thread but here is some really quick and easy tutorial of how to get started with Firebase and Swift. This is not advertising. I found this like pretty helpful and I'm just sharing it. Enjoy it! http://www.appcoda.com/firebase/ It's pretty Neat, huh! (Pasan's voice)

That would be amazing, and really, really useful!!!

Hi jonathanpatience,

You can keep going. We also have a condensed workshop - What's New in Swift 2.0 that you could take after you're done with this track.

If you can wait though I would recommend it. We went through all the data we had on where the courses need improving and what wasn't taught properly so these newer ones are better.

The old Swift Structs course will be replaced by the new Object Oriented Swift course which should be out in 3ish weeks if that's not too long for you.

Yeah I'd say go ahead and switch. A lot of the concepts are the same so there's no negative to taking the old courses. We also have a What's New in Swift 2.0 workshop but this only shows syntax and not how to use things in practice.

Like I've mentioned elsewhere in this post as well, the newer courses are better and I think it will do a better job of teaching you iOS development than the current ones.

If you wait couple more days we should be on the same pace as you :) The new Swift functions course comes out early next week. Optionals has changed sufficiently enough since the first version of the course (that you're currently taking) was released that I'd recommend waiting

Hey, thanks for your response!

Is the week by week release going to happen in the order of your list on this post?

I'm just concerned about finishing one track and then having a large delay before I can start the next one.

Yeah the list above is more or less in order. (95% finalized). I may add a course or two in there depending on whether student feedback indicates more explanation is needed.

You certainly could get started and that would be a great use of your time. However we are updating those courses as well and are looking to publish those in early November. The newer version of the Objective-C content is an improvement from a teaching perspective rather than any "new" content per se so totally up to you whether you want to wait on that or not

Because this is the Beginner iOS track. For Core Data you need to know some objective-c basics and we will be including this in the intermediate iOS development track.

We're only going to be sticking to Apple's development stack strictly so we won't be including 3rd party tools like Parse. I don't even know what Firebase is and I've never used them (both Parse or Firebase) so I disagree that iOS developers "need" to know them.

That being said, there's a decent amount of requests for Parse so we will probably do workshops on them in the near future. The way we structure content at Treehouse, workshops are not included in tracks so some of the content you ask for exists in the library, it's just not in the official track

Perhaps a beta version I can test out? btw here is my portfolio angeladon.io

I never said you don't need to know those things. I said that this is the Beginner iOS track. Beginner means there will also be an intermediate and an advanced track.

Abdullah Abdurrahman Ehsan: This is a follow up from 3 months later but I wanted to highlight something that happened today. Facebook shut Parse down.

To reiterate what I said earlier, it's really important to understand software development generally and not just how to use a single tool. Had we gone with Parse 3 months ago, everything we would have released would be wasted courses at this point.

Software platforms come and go but the basic skillsets always stay the same

Yeah we will be adding an Intermediate iOS dev track as soon as we're done with this one that covers stuff like scroll views, collection views, core data, cloudKit, etc. We keep track of long term requests here: https://trello.com/b/YKdTroug/treehouse-ios-content-roadmap

We're not teaching Parse in this track (doesnt mean it wont be taught outside of the track). There's a misconception that knowledge of Parse is required to be an iOS developer - it isnt. It certainly makes some tasks easier but the goal of this track is to teach iOS development that's applicable to any project and not just for ones that utilize Parse.

We will probably teach Parse as a workshop series that complements the content here.

Gabe Nadel is the ObjC teacher and can answer your questions :)

Switch :)

Protocols. I'll reorder things as they come out. Error types require protocol conformance to work so it made sense to release protocols first and get that understanding in place

Couple different things.

• Swift development is now done in the open. This means we (Treehouse) will be better able to anticipate and adapt our content accordingly rather than having to redo every thing every summer.
• Given the above, we know that Swift 2.2 is coming in early 2016 (not so many changes to the language) and Swift 3 is coming late 2016 (lots of changes!!).
• You may be able to start doing server side web development in Swift relatively soon, since people are porting stuff over to Linux.
• On the iOS side, nothing changes. Cocoa Touch and the iOS SDK is still closed source.

Open source mostly just means that since the entire toolchain (language, compiler, debugger, standard library, and core libraries) is available, people can start using Swift for all. If that happens, that's a while away.

Almost 10 years of iOS development have been done in Objective-C and the language isn't going anywhere anytime soon. While you can write Swift apps yourself, it's important to know objective-c so you can read iOS code and work on existing projects. Don't worry, we'll teach you Objective-C in the Swift track so you don't need to go anywhere else.

We will still primarily write our apps in Swift!

2.0, absolutely. Significant syntax changes and any "review" you end up doing will be time well spent.

I would go directly to the 2.0 course.