WWDC 2014 — Swift, Scenekit, and YOU
What you probably want to know:
Apple just made programming iOS and Mac apps about as easy as working with Javascript. Maybe easier.
Apple has just announced a new programming language called Swift. It's kind of like some kind of unholy love child of Go, Rust, Python, and Objective-C. Most importantly — no pointers, incredibly easy to learn (there's a free book), compiles to binary (and runs faster than Obj-C/C++ for at least some things), and it's also relatively safe ("managed code").
Apple also just made native game development in iOS (casual, at least) about as easy as using Unity or other similar frameworks by significantly beefing up SceneKit and SpriteKit.
You can import content from Cheetah 3D — including animations — with three lines of code. (Material support seems decidedly weaker — I suspect that may be a problem at C3D's end.)
Here's the three lines of Swift code:
Apple has also announced Metal — an OpenGL replacement — initially only for iOS, but it may also replace both OpenGL and OpenCL for Mac OS X since it provides GPGPU functionality. In particular, Metal allows developers to bypass the impedance mismatch between OpenGL and modern hardware (e.g. obsession with minimizing "draw calls" is an artifact of OpenGL, not the underlying graphics hardware). This probably affects Martin more than us
What you probably want to know:
Apple just made programming iOS and Mac apps about as easy as working with Javascript. Maybe easier.
Apple has just announced a new programming language called Swift. It's kind of like some kind of unholy love child of Go, Rust, Python, and Objective-C. Most importantly — no pointers, incredibly easy to learn (there's a free book), compiles to binary (and runs faster than Obj-C/C++ for at least some things), and it's also relatively safe ("managed code").
Apple also just made native game development in iOS (casual, at least) about as easy as using Unity or other similar frameworks by significantly beefing up SceneKit and SpriteKit.
You can import content from Cheetah 3D — including animations — with three lines of code. (Material support seems decidedly weaker — I suspect that may be a problem at C3D's end.)
Here's the three lines of Swift code:
Code:
let url = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("example", withExtension: "dae")
var error: NSErrorPointer? = nil
let scene = SCNScene.sceneWithURL(url, options: nil, error: error!)Apple has also announced Metal — an OpenGL replacement — initially only for iOS, but it may also replace both OpenGL and OpenCL for Mac OS X since it provides GPGPU functionality. In particular, Metal allows developers to bypass the impedance mismatch between OpenGL and modern hardware (e.g. obsession with minimizing "draw calls" is an artifact of OpenGL, not the underlying graphics hardware). This probably affects Martin more than us
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