Mike Ash:
Because the collections use generic types, they have no problem containing structs. Object members work without difficulty. They basically become pass-by-value objects rather than a totally different entity.
The result is that small model classes become a lot nicer in Swift. How many times have you used an NSMutableDictionary with a few fixed keys to represent a bag of related data that really should have been a class? If you’re like me, the answer is “too many”. That’s because making a simple Objective-C class is a bit of a pain.
[…]
[The trailing closures feature] is interesting because it knocks down a visual barrier separating language constructs from library calls. As I discussed way back in 2008, blocks are a great addition to Objective-C because they allow you to write your own control constructs. This showed up in a huge way with GCD, which could provide a ton of useful asynchronous calls that worked a lot like language constructs, but were implemented as library calls. However, with Objective-C, there’s still a syntactic difference in how you write calls with blocks compared to how you use built-in language constructs.
Language Design Programming Swift Programming Language
Jared Sinclair:
As I discussed above, interoperability is technically challenging no matter who attempts it. Apple clearly has the capacity to tackle the technical issues if it really wanted to. The central problem for interoperability is one of motivation. Who has the power to compel all the hospitals and EHR vendors in the US to open up read/write access to their medical records?
HealthKit iOS iOS 8
Stewart Wolpin:
First unveiled at the Tokyo MacWorld Expo on February 17, 1994, the QuickTake 100 went on sale 20 years ago from yesterday — June 20, 1994. It was priced at $749 and initiated the age of consumer digital photography.
[…]
The QuickTake 100, which captured and stored eight 640 x 480 pixel (or 16 320 x 240 pixel 24-bit color images) was the product of the inventor of the digital camera: Kodak. Afraid of jeopardizing its film business, Kodak didn’t want its own name on its own creation, just one in a long series of digital camera history ironies.
What’s even less known is how that first binocular-shaped digital camera started out 20 years earlier as a toaster-shaped device.
Anniversary Apple Camera History Kodak Photography QuickTake
Joshua Ho:
To be clear, iOS 8 will expose just about every manual camera control possible. This means that ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance, and exposure bias can be manually set within a custom camera application. Outside of these manual controls, Apple has also added gray card functionality to bypass the auto white balance mechanism and both EV bracketing and shutter speed/ISO bracketing.
Sounds good, but I hope the controls work better than the iOS 7 HDR button, which still keeps changing itself back to Auto.
Bug Camera High Dynamic Range (HDR) iOS iOS 7 iOS 8
