What I Learned from Paul Hegarty’s Stanford iOS 10 Course
For the past several years of programming in Swift, I’ve relied on any website I could find in order to get some insight. And yes, a few of the sources weren’t as reliable as others.
Within the past month, though, I’ve watched a Swift iOS course taught by Paul Hegarty. I expected the course to cover the basics of Swift without going in depth into the language, but while we began by developing a basic app, we ended with more complex projects.
To start off, Paul constructed a calculator app. The brain of this calculator includes closures to allow binary operations to process thoroughly after the user waits for an answer. Due to the accumulator being a component of multiple methods that changes periodically, mutating functions were essential for this step. Finally, we applied private enumerations and variable to prohibit access from separate classes.
The second application, “FaceIt”, featured an animated face that changes expressions through a segmented control. An appended extension saved the custom names of emotions, and private structures along with static constants were used to make the head shake to a specific degree, which was shared in other methods. Paul continued by setting a method that allowed the facial expressions to change consistently.
Images of life on Earth along with the galaxies of Cassini and Saturn were the focus of the next app, “Cassini.” This app fetches images from the internet via URL links, and we added an activity indicator to inform the user that images were loading. The app requires cellular data if the user is not connected to wifi. For better viewing, users are able to zoom into the picture at a maximum of 100 pixels.
“SmashTag”, the fourth app, uses the Twitter framework to pull tweets. First, we implemented a persistence container to find tweets from keywords when searched. To make it easier for users to be found by acquaintances, we included unique names in the app.
The final application was called “Asteroid,” a space game similar to the 1980s classic, allowing users to control a ship and dodge incoming asteroids. The spaceship can only withstand a few collisions with asteroids until its health is destroyed, at which point its health will replenish within two seconds. We implemented an instantaneous push behavior to start asteroids off in a random direction. The asteroids will consistently be in motion due to a new behavior being addressed, and a switch statement allows the ship's direction to be changed once the user has tapped on it. We used nine images for the explosions, which will be selected randomly.
It’s well known on iTunesU that Paul Hegarty’s Stanford iOS course is valuable, enlighten developers with any range of experience in programming. Calculator app explained how unary and binary operations are used to calculate results using multiple operands, while FaceIt provides the choice to select a variety of facial expressions depending on the user’s mood. With Smashtag, students learn to program a social media application that has over 300 million users. The range of applied skills alone is evidence that Stanford’s iOS 10 course provides knowledge for the basic to complex level of programming.

