@odower Very cool, Andy. With the announcement of Swift 2 and the number of changes, how do you look at the decision to build with Swift now? Do you anticipate tech debt time for your team to change syntax to fit Swift 2? Do you recommend others looking at building an iOS app start with Swift or Objective-C?
@eric3000 Thanks Eric! The path for the app development was: clickable prototype > PhoneGap prototype > decision point...Obj C or Swift. We didn't have an engineer on our team dedicated full time to Obj C and since Swift has some similarities to Javascript our lead designer and insanely talented engineer @infostruct said "give me this week to dive into Swift" and so he did! We've been doing through the developer-perspectives of Swift 2 and we don't see any major hurdles with syntax updates.
So many engineers are still staying with Objective-C from conversations we've had...but also many that haven't done Obj C development want to build iOS apps so they're taking another look. The open source developments with Swift show a different trend from Apple too, which is very interesting to see. Might open things up more!
@eric3000@odower Hi Eric. Very good question about Swift 2. Only time will tell. About a third of the way through the dev process we had to migrate from Swift 1.1 to 1.2 and XCode made that process completely painless. Grated that migration wasn't as big of a leap, but Apple promises to provide a similar migration tool in XCode7.
Looking back on the decision to go Swift, for this team it was absolutely the right call. With either language, the biggest challenge is going to be learning iOS and all of it's APIs. Doing so in Swift made that so much easier because it's syntax felt so comfy. We needed to learn just enough ObjC to translate older StackOverflow answers, but with XCode's autocomplete magic that was no trouble at all.
FWIW, I can't WAIT for Swift 2 and XCode7. 95% of our frustration with Swift in this process was XCode related crashes and compile issues. The other 5% were around Swift's error handling. Both seems to have been addressed in XCode7.
One thing that I didn't get a chance to mention yet, but the Hook Model (http://www.producthunt.com/tech/...) by @nireyal and @rrhoover played a HUGE part in our initial thinking around this app. Ryan was even helpful enough to take a call from me a long time ago when we were first finding our way with Curiosity. We have the 'investment' stage coming up (many of our fans want to say "show me more space stuff!" for example).
Wow, @odower! I'm remembering our call now. That was so long ago. Great job w/ the app. 😀
@nireyal's Hook Model is super helpful to think through and can often inspire new ideas. I'm meeting up with him Friday and looking forward to getting his thoughts on a big redesign of our mobile app.
@rrhoover Haha! Thanks Ryan! And thank you very much for your kind words about the app and everything you do with Product Hunt to make it a vibrant community.
Days like this are intense. @infostruct and I talked a lot about that feedback then and how to quickly iterate but keep things simple (always a challenge).
Funny also: I emailed you @nireyal earlier today (totally understand you are busy). Our head of partnerships @micburke27 I believe knows you as well.
Your comment on Twitter is so right: the internet is small. And fun!
Curiosity is a really neat idea that is both useful and entertaining. Learning about new things has never been this fun and easy. If only I could learn everything this way!
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