Since the July school holidays closely follow Apple’s WWDC this is usually when I feel motivated to sit down and have a crack at some of the programming projects that have built up in my todo list.
Despite the winter weather being unusually pleasant this year, and in amongst a couple of road trips around the South-West (mostly Ingress-related), I’ve actually managed to do a surprising amount of coding done (even though they’re mostly proof of concept projects).
One site I’ve found quite helpful has been Hacking With Swift, which has some nice simple tutorial projects, each demonstrating one or two useful concepts. Despite the changes with Swift 2 this year, I’m fairly comfortable with the language itself by now, but the various APIs are still frequently baffling, especially some of the new stuff introduced with GameplayKit this year, not helped by the simple demos which Apple released all being in Objective C, and the complex all-in-one demo a) being in Swift; and b) using ReplayKit, which doesn’t work in the simulator, meaning you either need a beta device or to be running OS X 10.11 so you can run the desktop code.
At this rate I might actually have some of my aspirational stuff written by the time next year’s WWDC rolls around to throw new stuff at me.