5 Steps to Success: From Swift Beginner to Swift Professional

All the things in the world have a shortcut or some tricks to make work easy and it all depends on how well you can implement those shortcuts to achieve what you want. While a shortcut is always beneficial, it is particularly helpful in the software business. This article will reveal some tips that will enhance your Swift 3 skills and make you a pro at it.

From Beginner to Pro

Use Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a great way of showing your skills and also increasing your work speed. Some such shortcuts in Swift 3 are:

• Command key with 0 to view or hide navigator.
• Command key with 1 (or numbers to 8) for each element of navigator.
• Command key with Shift and Y to quickly access the debug area.

There are many other amazing shortcuts available and they can effectively save time and effort. Practicing these keyboard shortcuts and making use of them in the long run can affect your work big time.

Organize Your Functions

The codes or functions that you use in Swift 3 can be broadly classified into different subheads like delegates, action, override, etc. You can use codes with forward slashes and a keyword to streamline the functions for easy access from the Method dropdown list. The keywords that are used to organize codes are TODO, MARK, and FIXME. These are preceded with forward slashes and written as \\ TODO or \\ MARK, etc. While MARK is a standalone feature, TODO and FIXME can be used within MARK as reminders for pending work.

Incorporate Effort-Saving Methods

There are few methods that can reduce your efforts significantly. For example, the Swizzling Method which helps in altering the working of an existing selector saves a lot of time by eliminating the need for adding extra codes, creating subclasses, etc. Some other examples of such methods are using default arguments to reduce bulk and sort things. These effort-saving techniques do not only save the hard work but help eliminate errors that might arise because of tedious coding.

Avoid Typical Objective-C Codes

Some of the snippets used in Objective-C can affect the performance. Additionally, the advanced versions of Swift no longer require some of the snippets that were traditionally used. For example, Swift no longer requires NSNumber but rather uses Int:, Uint:, etc. Similarly, using NSObject and @objc can cause performance issues in Swift. As a developer who was used to Objective-C, you might not find it difficult to adopt Swift but you just need to unlearn a few things that you were used to.

Make Use of the Playground

If you are a beginner, polish your skills using the playground available in Swift. A playground is a pre-loaded option which has codes and you can alter or modify those existing codes to achieve desired results. To get started with a playground, select the relevant option whenever you launch Xcode.

While these skills are sure to enhance your knowledge of the Swift, I am sure there a lot more things that a developer can incorporate or practice to improve his or her knowledge. Avid Swift fans and iPhone application development professionals post interesting trivia from time to time. And, if you are one of them, leave a message in the comment section below, add to the tips above, or simply share your knowledge.