Migrating to Swift from Flash and ActionScript

This book builds on your knowledge of ActionScript to take you on to the fast track developing iOS apps with Apple’s latest language, Swift. Swift’s syntax is easier to understand than Objective-C for people already familiar with ActionScript. At the same time it offers a number of new features and richer expressiveness than both ActionScript and Objective-C.

Switching to a new platform usually involves migration on three levels: tools, workflow, and programming language. This book is structured as a guide that will help you on each level with step-by-step tutorials. Apart from the tutorials, it comes with recipes for some of the most popular mobile development topics: social network integration and messaging, taking advantage of device capabilities, networking and working with local and iCloud data, advertising in your app or game, and 2D and 3D graphics. The book also includes a final chapter that takes you through Apple’s App Store submission process. Don’t just build your apps, sell them.

What You Will Learn

• Expand your development knowledge to native iOS programming with Swift
• Use the latest Xcode 7 IDE
• Migrate your existing ActionScript projects to Swift
• Create advanced UI, leverage the device hardware, integrate with social networks, take advantage of 2D and 3D graphics
• Diagnose your app quickly with Xcode’s debugger and instruments
• Prepare and submit our iOS app in Apple’s App Store

Who This Book is For

Migrating to Swift from Flash and ActionScript is for Flash and Adobe AIR developers who want to move on to native iOS programming with the latest Apple Swift language. It’s for the seasoned ActionScript programmer who is looking to add another language and platform to their tool belt quickly. Migrating to Swift from Flash and ActionScript is a good choice for developers who learn by doing and don’t have time to read thick manuals and books for beginners in order to start programming in a new language.

Table of Contents

Part I: Tool Migration
Chapter 1: Setting Up Your Environment
Chapter 2: Hello, Xcode!
Chapter 3: Introducing the Xcode Debugger
Chapter 4: Additional Development Tools

Part II: Workflow Migration
Chapter 5: “Hello, Swift!”—A Tutorial for Building an iOS App
Chapter 6: Adding a More Complex UI
Chapter 7: Concurrency
Chapter 8: Debugging and Testing Your App

Part III: Making Apps with Swift—Applied Examples
Chapter 9: Communicating: E-mail, Text Messages, and Calls
Chapter 10: Getting Social: Posting to Facebook and Twitter
Chapter 11: Knowing Your Location
Chapter 12: Working with the Camera and Images
Chapter 13: Working with Data
Chapter 14: Networking
Chapter 15: Adverts and Push Notifications
Chapter 16: Using the High-End Graphics APIs

Part IV: Language Migration
Chapter 17: Swift Language Basics
Chapter 18: Operators
Chapter 19: Types
Chapter 20: Control Flow
Chapter 21: Object-Oriented Programming Topics
Chapter 22: New and Different Concepts
Chapter 23: Releasing Your App in the App Store