This iPhone AR tool can be used to make it easier to redesign your space digitally

Source: Russ Maschmeyer

Redecorating a room in your home can be a fun challenge. We emphasize the word challenge, though. But one of the new features Apple introduced to developers last month could help out with digitally planning a space. Yes, you won't need to move any furniture around first. RoomPlan is a new Swift API that uses Apple's ARKit and an iPhone or iPad with a camera and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). The scanner can generate detailed and accurate 3D floor plans, including features like windows and doors. It can even automatically recognize and measure different furniture. And then, it can edit your furniture pieces out of the shot, making it seem like you have an empty room to work with. 

Click to read more ...

Celebrate Computer Science Education Week with these tips from Apple

Just in time for Computer Science Education Week (December 7 - 13), Apple is encouraging your kids (or even yourself) to learn about the joys of coding. You don't have to be a certain age to know more about the discipline. And Apple offers some tips on where you can get started.

Click to read more ...

Apple's Craig Federighi dishes on Swift in open source

Apple's SVP for Software Engineering Craig Federighi - Photo By Gadjo C. Sevilla

Apple's Senior Vice President for Software Engineering Craig Federighi was a guest on John Gruber's The Talk Show podcast recently and gave some insights on Swift in open source. Swift is Apple's unified programming language which it hopes developers will shift to from Objective C. Apple released Swift into open source recently hoping to make it widely available to all developers. 

Federighi said that Swift is the most popular language on Github, which is a widely used repository for open source programming and resources.  Expected to be the major language for the next 20 years and the lynchpin of Apple's various OS ecosystems, Swift is now also available for Linux where it can be used on servers. 

 "I think our team is a really seasoned team in the world of developing languages and we know that a language really can’t be developed in a vacuum," Federighi noted. "The first step is you have to crystallize your basic ideas and have a starting point. But we knew we needed feedback then to work toward the language that ultimately Swift has become and will become in the future." For more information on Swift, check this link.

Source: Daring Fireball

IBM introduces Swift Sandbox, lets developers write and execute code on their browsers

In tune with Apple's move to release the Swift iOS an OS X authoring language to Open Source, IBM has revealed the Swift Sandbox, a clever interactive website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment – on top of Linux in a cloud infrastructure.

Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for coders to use. For more on IBM's work on Swift, head on over to their page.