Swift
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NY Fed rejected, then later approved $81 million bank heist
The financial industry has used a messaging system made by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) to securely authenticate transfers between banks for decades. But recent fraudulent money requests have broken the system's impenetrable reputation. Back in February, hackers used this method to steal $81 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but officials just revealed that those requests had been red flagged and rejected previously in the day -- only to be approved hours later.
Banking service SWIFT adds new security plan following hacks
Banks use a service to send secure messages built by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) to send financial transaction instructions. But recently it hasn't been so secure: Hackers stole $12 million from Ecuador banks earlier this week, the latest in a slew of thefts. Today, SWIFT released a plan to work with its customers (the banks) to shore up the messaging system's security.
Report: Bank network flaw helped hackers steal $80 million
Thieves who stole $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank may have been aided by a security flaw in the SWIFT international banking network, according to Reuters. Security researchers from BAE found malware designed to help thieves delete transfer information to hide their tracks. "I can't think of a case where we have seen a criminal go to the level of effort to customize it for the environment they were operating in," says BAE's Adrian Nish. SWIFT, a coop with 3,000 member banks, confirmed that it knew about malware targeting its client software, though Bangladesh police say they haven't found it on the bank's servers yet.
Apple makes its Swift programming language open source
Earlier this year, Apple said it would be making its programming language Swift open source. And now the company's making good on that promise to developers, specifically those who want to make apps for OS X, iOS and watchOS. Swift, which Apple describes as powerful and easy to use, will be open source under the Apache License, giving devs access to a full set of tools to create anything from 3D games to social networking apps.More importantly, Swift was built to play nice with Objective-C, allowing developers to create projects that blend existing code with Apple's new programming language. If you're interested in playing around with it, Apple's Swift.org site has more information -- although it appears to be down right now.
Wileyfox Swift and Storm review: Two cheap UK phones, one worth buying
There are two ways you can go about buying a new smartphone: Either you spread the cost over a year or two with a carrier contract, or purchase the thing outright. When you're finally done paying it off, a subsidised handset often ends up costing more than it's worth. However, considering the price of new iPhones, Samsung flagships and peers, that can still be preferable to emptying your bank account in one fell swoop. Thankfully, companies big and small are addressing this conundrum with phones that offer the kind of specs and user experience customers want at prices they're happy to pay upfront. Despite an abundance of competition in contract-free handsets already, new British brand Wileyfox is one such company, and it's hoping to make its mark in the UK with the affordable £129 Swift and higher-end £199 Storm.
Hands-on with the £129 Wileyfox Swift
Two years ago, Motorola pioneered a new smartphone category with the original Moto G: the almost flagship. It was a device that offered close to high-end performance and design with a price-tag usually reserved for less capable mid-tier handsets. It's now the company's bestselling smartphone and few, if any of its rivals have managed to replicate its winning formula. The latest competitor to step up and take a shot is Wileyfox, a complete newcomer from the UK. Over the next couple of months it'll be launching two new smartphones which run the Cyanogen flavor of Android: the Swift and the Storm. The cheaper of the two, the £129 ($200) Swift, sits somewhere between the latest Moto G and entry-level Moto E. But it's got a lot to prove if it hopes to steal some of the company's thunder.
NASA satellite shows black hole 'bulls-eye' eruption
NASA said its Swift satellite has imaged some of "the best dust-scattered X-ray ring images ever seen" from a black hole outburst. The V404 Cygni black hole and its companion star, about 8,000 light years away, are known to eject high-energy particles every 20 years or so. Swift's X-ray telescope detected the start of a new burst on June 15th, grabbing the attention of scientists at the University of Leicester, UK. On June 30th, they captured an eruption of concentric rings from the system that covered a portion of the sky about half the diameter of the moon.
Apple's Swift programming language is going open source
Last year, Apple introduced Swift, its very own programming language, which was focused on making it easier to build apps. Now, in a bid to make it more palatable to developers, Apple is making another big move: It's making Swift open source. That'll give developers full access to all of Swift's inner workings, and it might even tempt over people who were worried about adopting a proprietary Apple language. "We think Swift is the next big programming language, the one that we'll all be doing application and system programming on for 20 years to come," Apple's SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said during WWDC today. "We think Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone." The language is also getting some upgrades this year with Swift 2, which includes support for new optimization technology, protocol extensions and much shorter compile times.
Supernovae suggest the universe is growing slower than expected
Don't look now, but what you know about the universe's growth might have been turned on its ear. University of Arizona scientists have learned that a certain type of supernova (Ia) isn't the reliable measuring stick for universe expansion that previous data would suggest. By comparing optical and ultraviolet images (such as in the hybrid image you see above), they found that older, farther exploding stars aren't behaving in the same way as newer ones closer to our own star. In other words, the ancient supernovae aren't necessarily as distant as you'd think -- and if they aren't, the universe isn't growing as quickly as textbooks say.
Stanford releases Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift course on iTunes U
Stanford has released a new course for iTunes University that will be a godsend to aspiring developers. Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift currently consists of two lectures and accompanying slide shows, each clocking in at a little over an hour. Here's the complete overview. Updated for iOS 8 and Swift. Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms using the iOS SDK. User interface design for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multi-touch technologies. Object-oriented design using model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, Swift programming language. Other topics include: animation, mobile device power management, multi-threading, networking and performance considerations. Prerequisites: C language and object-oriented programming experience exceeding Programming Abstractions level, and completion of Programming Paradigms. Recommended: UNIX, graphics, databases. As always with iTunes U, this course is free to download in the iTunes Store.
Popularity of Swift is on the rise in a major way
At WWDC 2014, Apple delivered a bombshell of an announcement when Craig Federighi unveiled Swift, a new high-level programming language positioned to be the future of iOS development. In a broad sense, the underlying goal of Swift is to make programming for iOS much more approachable than Objective-C, not a hard task given the latter's daunting syntex. Moreover, Swift aims to make it easier for developers to churn out incredible apps with less code, making for a more efficient development process all around. Objective-C, meanwhile, isn't going anywhere just yet. Naturally, it takes time for a new programming language to gain traction amongst developers. Moreover, there's never a guarantee that a newly introduced programming language will take off in the first place. Still, Apple has indicated that Swift -- which was in secret development for four years at Apple -- is the future of iOS development, so perhaps its time to check in and see how developers are taking to the programming language nearly 7 months after its debut. According to Redmonk, a research firm which tracks and ranks programming languages, developer interest in Swift is on a discernible, if not unprecedented rise. As was said during the Q3 rankings which marked its debut, "Swift is a language that is going to be a lot more popular, and very soon." Even so, the growth that Swift experienced is essentially unprecedented in the history of these rankings. When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped somewhere between 5 and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by. And yet Swift has gone from our 68th ranked language during Q3 to number 22 this quarter, a jump of 46 spots. From its position far down on the board, Swift now finds itself one spot behind Coffeescript and just ahead of Lua. As the plot suggests, Swift's growth is more obvious on StackOverflow than GitHub, where the most active Swift repositories are either educational or infrastructure in nature, but even so the growth has been remarkable. Given this dramatic ascension, it seems reasonable to expect that the Q3 rankings this year will see Swift as a Top 20 language. It's important to note, however, that these rankings do not necessarily correlate with developer adoption. As Wired points out, the rankings use "only two dimensions to rank developer interest: the number of lines of code in the popular code hosting and collaboration site GitHub, and the number of questions being asked about a particular language on the question and answers site StackOverflow." Given how young Swift is, it's hard to dispute that iOS development remains a primarily Objective-C endeavor. That said, the App Store remains the most lucrative mobile software storefront on the planet, and with Apple throwing its full weight and support behind Swift, it stands to reason that Swift will continue to make even more headway in the future. For anyone interested, Apple's Swift announcement from WWDC can be viewed below.
The strategies and challenges involved in developing new programming languages such as Swift
WWDC 2014 was unquestionably one of the best Apple events in years. While there were no hardware announcements, developers and Apple enthusiasts at large were treated to a two hour event chock-full of surprises, not the least of which was the introduction of an entirely new programming language Apple calls Swift. A project in the making since 2010, Swift's selling point is that developers can more simply and intuitively put together advanced iOS apps. With the introduction of Swift, Apple now adds its name to a respectable list of companies that have similarly attempted to ably craft their future by rolling out new programming languages. On that note, Scott Rosenberg has an immersive post up on Medium detailing the seemingly increased effort from large tech companies to create their own programming languages. The article focuses mostly on Google's Go and Apple's Swift, and provides a good read for anyone interested in the benefits, challenges, history behind and strategies involved in creating a new programming language from scratch. The article also includes a number of interesting and optimistic soundbites on Swfit from Andy Hertzfeld, a famed and uber-talented software engineer who was an integral part of the original Mac development team in the 80s. Years later, Hertzfeld would eventually wind up at Google where he helped develop Google Plus. Today developers say the language [Objective C] is showing its age. "Apple had decades-old cruft in the face of anyone who wanted to write for any of their platforms," says Andy Hertzfeld, a software veteran who wrote much of the original Mac operating system and recently retired from Google. "I got pretty excited about Swift when I saw the announcement, because I've always despised Objective C. I like the principles behind it, but I hate the syntax, and have never been able to really enjoy programming in it." ... "Beautifully done," says Hertzfeld. "It relieves enormous pain points right in everyone's face. So the only iOS developers who are not going to get on top of Swift are the dumb ones." Since Swift is built to co-exist with Objective C code within the same project, toe-wetting is easy, even for developer sticks-in-the-mud. That notwithstanding, Hertzfeld is holding off on jumping head first into Swift for the time being as it effectively means you're exclusively working behind Apple's simultaneously adored and hated "walled garden." Again, the article is well worth a read as it provides a number of interesting insights and observations regarding the reasoning, struggles, and repercussions that invariably accompany an endeavor as massive as developing a new programming language.
Beyond Swift: visit Apple's official blogs of yesteryear
The introduction of Apple's programming language Swift at WWDC represents a departure from tradition in several ways. If an entirely new coding dialect wasn't enough, last week the company also launched a blog specifically focused on Swift. The new blog is aimed at developers working to adopt Swift, delivering tips and tricks to ease the learning curve. Any gesture of glasnost from Apple is newsworthy -- but something about the Mac Observer's headline Apple Launches Swift Developer Blog, Its First Ever Blog didn't ring quite right. As Macworld's story points out, Apple's Developer Connection site has included a blog for quite some time, even if the overall tone was more "bulletins from headquarters" and less "fireside chat." There are also developer-centric blogs that come under Apple's ownership umbrella (although they don't live on the apple.com domain) for both Safari's Webkit engine and the Mac OS Forge open source projects hub. What if we scan even further back into the mists? Indeed, there have been several past appearances of "official" Apple blogs for some segments of the company's business. In 2008, we saw the launch of an official MobileMe blog (which initially boiled down to "Sorry, our bad" in light of the CEO's reaction to the less-than-stellar online product). That site continued to see intermittent posts until 2011 and the beginning of the iCloud transition. Before there was MobileMe, there was .Mac, and naturally that included a .Mac blog of tips and tricks. That site first appeared in 2006... and then ceased updating later in 2006, from January to July to be specific. Neither of those sites, however, beat out the earliest Apple-hosted official blog I've been able to spot: the Apple Education blog, founded in November of 2004 and featuring a rotating cast of student authors. The honor of being the first contributor went to a recent University of Colorado at Boulder grad and newly minted Apple hire, one Dave Morin... whom you may have heard of: he's now the co-founder and CEO of Path. This blog actually made it past its first anniversary, with the final post coming in December of 2005. With luck and dedication, the Swift blog may indeed escape the "Apple official blog curse" and celebrate several birthdays. We're rooting for it. Meanwhile, if you know of an earlier Apple blog, let us know in the comments!
The TUAW Daily Update Podcast for July 11, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. You can also subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Apple launches blog for new Swift programming language
With the release of iOS 8 getting closer by the day, Apple has started a new blog to answer questions about Swift, the new programming language for iOS and OS X. Swift aims to make writing code more interactive and fun, while keeping apps running fast. The opening topic for the blog addresses Swift's possible compatibility issues. Swift can work alongside Objective-C code, allowing developers to easily integrate it into their existing apps or build their own from scratch. As Swift evolves, Apple plans to provide Xcode tools to help move your old source code forward along with changes in the language. The goal with Swift is to keep your apps working now and into the future. From the blog: Simply put, if you write a Swift app today and submit it to the App Store this Fall when iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are released, you can trust that your app will work well into the future. In fact, you can target back to OS X Mavericks oriOS 7 with that same app. This is possible because Xcode embeds a small Swift runtime library within your app's bundle. Because the library is embedded, your app uses a consistent version of Swift that runs on past, present, and future OS releases. You can check out the rest of the Swift blog here, including details about Binary Compatibility and Frameworks. For more information on Swift, head over to the language's announcement page.
Swift file icons pay homage to Apple's "Here's to the crazy ones..." text
Though the glory days of Apple Easter eggs has passed us by, Apple every now and again manages to throw a little something fun into the mix. Most recently, developer Alexander Blunck discovered (via 9to5Mac) that if you zoom in close on the icons used for Swift files, you can see fragments of Apple's iconic "Here's to the crazy ones..." text. This, of course, isn't the first time Apple has paid homage to the narrative text used in the company's famed "Think Different" ad campaign. It's long been known that Apple's TextEdit application icon houses the speech as well, albeit in a more complete form. Some other Apple Easter eggs of the same ilk include the following. The "All My Files" icon introduced in OS X Lion featured a hidden Steve Jobs tribute in the form of quotes from some of Jobs' most well-known soundbites. Also introduced in OS X Lion is this gem. If a user makes his/her login icon a vinyl record, the icon itself pays tribute to some of Jobs' favorite keynote adjectives.
Looking at Swift and what Steve Jobs said about increasing programmer productivity
Apple this week introduced Swift, a new high-level programming language meant to usher in a new future for iOS development. While there are a number of great facets to Swift, one of its more frequently cited benefits is that the syntax is much more approachable and readable than Objective-C. What's more, Swift promises to let developers create powerful apps with less code, making for a more efficient development process. To illustrate this, there have been no shortage of code snippets posted online which match up Swift code against Objective-C code. For instance, developer Jordan Clifton earlier this week posted a few examples which make the point rather emphatically. Array initialization: Objective-C NSArray *myArray = [[NSArray alloc] init]; Swift let myArray = String[](); ... Creating an array with items also looks quite different: Objective-C NSArray *myArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:@"one", @"two", @"three", nil]; Swift var myArray = ["one", "two", "three"]; The unveiling of Swift and its myriad of features brings to mind a blurb about programming Steve Jobs once made during a Q&A session at WWDC 1997. The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the line of code per programmer per day. That doesn't work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write. The line of code that is the fastest to write, that never breaks, that never needs maintenance is the line that you never have to write. The goal here is to eliminate 80% of the code that you have to write for your app. That's the goal. Video of the unscripted Q&A, which is well worth watching in its entirety, is viewable below. The pertinent portion of the video begins at 40 minutes and 50 seconds.
Apple's Swift programming language has been in the works for 4 years
Of the many surprises Apple had in store for us this past Monday, the introduction of an entirely new programming language called Swift was particularly well received by developers. John Gruber's tweet in the wake of the announcement sums things up rather well: Media badge people are silent, attendees going nuts. This is huge huge news, the future of all Apple development. - John Gruber (@gruber) June 2, 2014 Huge news indeed. Swift is a high level programming language that promises to be more approachable than Objective-C, making it easier for developers to get their hands dirty and churn out incredible apps. Just as important, Swift can coexist peacefully alongside Objective-C code from within the same app. All in all, developers appear to be exceedingly excited about Swift. Now it's fair to say that absolutely no one was predicting that Apple would introduce an entirely new programming language this week, which tends to make the story behind Swift all the more intriguing. To that end, Apple's Chris Lattner -- who was the original mind behind Swift's development -- provides us with a few details regarding the timeframe surrounding Swift's development. I started work on the Swift Programming Language in July of 2010. I implemented much of the basic language structure, with only a few people knowing of its existence. A few other (amazing) people started contributing in earnest late in 2011, and it became a major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group in July 2013. The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list. The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems. I hope that by making programming more approachable and fun, we'll appeal to the next generation of programmers and to help redefine how Computer Science is taught. Remember, you can check out Apple's book on the Swift programming language for free from the iBookstore. Video of the the Swift announcement from WWDC can be seen below courtesy of The Verge. The audience applause really speaks volumes. And as a final point of interest, Lattner initially began working at Apple in 2005 when he joined the Developer Tools Group.
The Swift Programming Language manual available on iBookstore
One of the bigger surprises during today's WWDC 2014 keynote was the announcement of Swift, a new programming language for developing iOS and OS X apps. Apple wasted no time in making the Swift Programming Language manual available online on the iBookstore for free. The 860 page manual contains many code samples and it's suggested that you try them out in Xcode -- in fact, the chapters of the books can be opened as playgrounds in Xcode, giving would-be Swift programmers the ability to edit the code listings and see the results immediately.
Engineering a better bicycle with DBC City Bike Design
My day with Dan Sorger was winding down and the photographers were out joyriding on his bicycles when he beckoned me to look at something on his tiny, age-stained LCD monitor. Nestled in between a curling collection of Post-It notes was an anecdote about a wealthy Italian man which he began to read aloud, "Once upon a time, long ago ..." According to the story he had spent an exorbitant sum of money to modify his prized Alfa Romeo. As a result, his family tried to have him declared insane and wrest control of his fortune. As the trial got underway, the judge asked to see the vehicle in question and, once he set his eyes on the custom-crafted aluminum body, he dismissed the case, declaring, "The search for beauty is the most natural thing in man." The tale is allegedly the origin of storied automobile designer Ugo Zagato, but it's the judge who is the real star and it's his words that struck a chord with Dan, the founder and owner of DBC City Bike Design.
