Swift is becoming more popular by the day and new initiatives pop up left and right. In this article, I list six projects I stumbled upon in my never-ending search for audacious initiatives.
Swift Algorithm Club
Matthijs Hollemans is a prolific writer and developer who knows a thing or two about Cocoa development. Earlier this year, he started working on a collection of algorithms and data structures implemented in Swift.
The project's documentation is what makes it stand out. Every algorithm and data structure included in the project is carefully documented. That is the primary goal of Swift Algorithm Club. If you ever find yourself struggling with a particular algorithm or data structure in Swift, make sure to check out Swift Algorithm Club first.
Break Out to Refresh
I don't know what motivated Dominik Hauser to create this project, but the result is fun and amusing. But what is it? Instead of showing a boring activity indicator when a table view is being refreshed, Dominik's library shows a tiny game users can play as long as they are waiting for a response from the server. To be honest, I have yet to find a project I can use it in, but I am looking forward to an application that pulls it off.
Advance
Earlier this year, the team at Storehouse open sourced Advance, an animation framework for iOS. The framework, written entirely in Swift, enables developers to add complex animations and interactions to an application. Physics is an important component of Advance and the framework is built with customization in mind.
Material
As its name suggests, Material is a framework that brings Google's Material Design to iOS. Color schemes, views, and controls. This framework is packed with features, including the animations and design paradigms that set Material Design apart.
If you like Material Design or want to build an iOS application that looks and feels like an Android application, then this is the best solution I know of.
Vapor
Vapor is a framework for building web applications with Swift. Because the framework is written in Swift, you can expect an elegant and expressive syntax. The Vapor project was developed alongside Fluent, an ORM library based on Laravel's Eloquent ORM. It was only a matter of time before Swift made the jump to the web.
CocoaLumberjack
Even though CocoaLumberjack isn't new or trending, it is one of my favorite libraries for Cocoa development. It makes logging flexible and powerful, without compromising ease of use. CocoaLumberjack is not difficult to set up and the library really shines in combination with Xcode Colors. If you are looking for a powerful logging library, then look no further and give CocoaLumberjack a try. Note that Xcode Colors currently only works with Xcode 7. Let us hope this changes in the future.
We Are Only Getting Started
The web and mobile space are exploding with amazing initiatives, making it hard to keep track of every promising project that is released. Swift is at the forefront of modern software development and there has never been a better time to get started with Swift development.
