Swift Toolbox – community-supported catalog of iOS and OS X libraries

http://www.swifttoolbox.io

by adamjleonard • 12 years ago

143 35 12 years ago

We would love to hear your feedback. This project is very MVP and definitely has some issues that we will be iterating on over the next week.

Any features you would like to see, let us know. We plan on adding a much nicer view for all the libraries with more information. The ability to the community to add tags to existing libraries, and more.

Hope you guys enjoy!

ikura• 12 years ago

Nice idea... Currently it's only legal to share source code libraries though right? Binary swift frameworks would constitute Apple NDA covered software, so unless they're compile with Xcode 5 we'd have to wait for pro-tool libraries like Parse, Splitforce and Google Analytics to arrive?

irace• 12 years ago

What about some kind of integration with CocoaPods? Seems like there's going to be some duplicated effort here.

jayvanguard• 12 years ago

2nding

adamjleonard4• 12 years ago

Yep, going to look in to this in the near future. Going to talk to someone at CocoaPods on Friday.

agp2572• 12 years ago

Good idea.

skierscott• 12 years ago

Would it be acceptable for me to submit someone else's package? Can they edit tags/etc?

Oh, and nice idea. I've been waiting for something like this. Ideally, I'd like to see something a package manager like brew or apt.

jaegerpicker2• 12 years ago

It's already there CocoaPods, they already support swift and Obj-C and there is a huge library of packages available.

adamjleonard4• 12 years ago

It would be acceptable. We will be adding the ability for the repo owner to manage the entire project, but also the community will be able to add extra tags, etc. These are in the upcoming weeks as we iterate on it.

mercurial• 12 years ago

As a non-Mac person, it's fascinating to see the difference in interest between Swift and Dart. Sounds like you can do "incremental progress" and succeed (Typescript), "radical progress" (Swift) and succeed, but something between the two doesn't work, at least as far as community uptake is concerned.

Zelphyr• 12 years ago

One possible difference is that Apple has signaled that Swift will be the language at some point. As far as I know Google didn't do that with Dart and, in fact, couldn't without getting buy-in from all the other browser vendors.

kybernetyk• 12 years ago

One possible difference is that Apple has signaled that Swift will be the language at some point

Have they? Then I really hope they add some easy form of C++ interop to swift in a future release.

There's so much C++ code out there in the Mac/iOS world that rewriting it to swift (or even just wrapping it in C) would make no economic sense.

lukifer• 12 years ago

I think the context of the replaced languages also matters. Objective-C is de facto Apple-only to start, whereas Javascript is currently the largest run-everywhere language, mostly due to an accident of history that Dart is not likely to replicate.

apetrovic• 12 years ago

I actually hope Apple won't abandon Objective C and continue to improve it. I'd like to have languages from both sides of the spectrum (dynamic ObjC vs strongly typed Swift).

aikah2• 12 years ago

I totally agree,Dart should be first class on Android for instance.Or what the point creating a whole new language.To run it in the browser?it will never win in that field.Dart is a good language,Dart engine could be an alternative to V8 in nodejs too.

astigsen2• 12 years ago

It probably helped that there was a lot of latent frustration about the Objective-C syntax, which looked very foreign for developers coming from other languages (apart from smalltalk :-)). So by announcing a language with a familiar and modern looking syntax, they captured the interest of a lot of developers who was attracted to building apps on iOS, but didn't want to use Objective-C.

I think that it also helped that they had a lot of high quality documentation (like the Swift book) ready from day one.

WoodenChair• 12 years ago

By most measures Dart is outpacing Typescript in terms of uptake (Stack Overflow questions, #of major publishers releasing books, etc). I agree with the other posters that Swift has been all but declared as the de facto (and eventually de jure) future of a huge platform - neither Typescript nor Dart can make that claim.

aikah2• 12 years ago

Stack Overflow questions,

true but not by a long shot :

ts : 2,441

dart: 3,465

now compared to all js questions both are insignificant anyway ( 641,566 )

neither Typescript nor Dart can make that claim

as devs move to ES6 using TS will make more sense ,that's Microsoft bet.

pjmlp3• 12 years ago

Not from the code I see everyday being written on our consulting projects.

It is still pure JavaScript. No customer wants those languages on their code base.

gress2• 12 years ago

The politics with Swift are well understood - it's simply an alternative to Objective-C that is technically superior in. A bunch of ways. Objective-C is effectively proprietary, so if you are willing to program Objective-C, you are presumably ok with programming on Apple's platform and it's just a straightforward technical choice.

Dart is an alternative to JavaScript, and the politics are a lot more murky. JavaScript is the open language of the web and is not controlled by a single vendor. Although Google has opaquely submitted Dart to ECMA, the politics are much less clear, and of course they have given themselves a multi-year head start in implementing and understanding the language. Supporting Dart involves risking handing even more control over the web to Google.

pjmlp3• 12 years ago

Google submitting Dart to ECMA is no different from Microsoft submitting .NET to ECMA, alongside the .NET early versions source code (I forgot how it was called).

mikeash• 12 years ago

I think it comes down to the perceived future of the language more than anything.

Dart support is pretty poor. You can compile to JavaScript, but that adds friction. Browsers don't support it directly, and probably never will. It seems like there's a pretty decent chance that Dart will be dead within a few years, at which point any time invested into it will have been somewhat wasted.

Swift support is pretty good. It's completely integrated into Apple's toolchain, and writing an app in Swift today is just like writing an app in Objective-C. Apple's throwing their weight behind it and there's zero chance that it will go away anytime soon. Putting time into it carries zero risk as long as you think you'll want to continue to target Apple platforms.

This is the upside of Apple's dictatorial "I am the platform!" model. If they decide that the platform shall support a new language, then the platform shall support a new language. On June 1st, the main language for development on Apple platforms was Objective-C. On June 2nd, it was Objective-C and Swift, just like that.

No company can swoop in and impose something like that on the web. This is generally a good thing, as one company can't fuck it up for everybody. But there are disadvantages, like it being really really hard to push a good new language.

dottrap3• 12 years ago

Yeah! Screwing it up for everybody is what standards committees are for :P

jaegerpicker2• 12 years ago

Awesome project I know I'll use several of this packages. It would be awesome to list the packages CocoaPods name if it has one. So it's easy to install.

niix• 12 years ago

This is a great help for someone like myself who is just learning Swift. Pretty excited for some of the JavaScript style libraries being ported over to Swift.

adamjleonard4• 12 years ago

Seems to be quite a few in regards to the functional world. Underscore has a port over and a couple others that mimic this.

wuliwong• 12 years ago

If you are just starting out, checkout http://www.sososwift.com It has tons and tons of resources.

Swift Toolbox – community-supported catalog of iOS and OS X libraries

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