Swift · @jnjosh’s internet weblog

Learning German with AVSpeechUtterance

Posted on February 21, 2016 in Cocoa, Programming, iOS, AV Foundation, Swift, German

For the last couple of months I’ve been studying German with my wife. We both have always wanted to become polyglots so we decided to stop waiting around an just start learning. We both have some ancestors from Germany and would love to visit, so that was a great place to start. One thing I’ve been struggling with is numbers in German. I can count well, but hearing a number in conversation requires a lot of thought. The problem is it is backwards from English, Twenty-One in German would be One-and-Twenty (einundzwanzig). So what’s an iOS Developer to do? I made an app for me to practice.

Swift, you’ve changed so much

Posted on March 23, 2015 in Cocoa, Swift, Open Source

During the crazy week of WWDC 2014—right after the announcement of Swift—I decided to spend a little time trying to implement a quick weather app using the new language. I managed to wrap it up in a few hours (and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to parse JSON with a generically-typed dictionary) and open sourced it. There it sat for all these months while several versions of Swift were released.