Our Flying Friends

Halle's latest posts

OpenEars and Swift

21 May

UPDATE: Swift 3 support is now available.

Hello again! I wanted to share some information about OpenEars Platform Swift support. I like Swift, and OpenEars works well with Swift (there are self-supported discussions in the OpenEars forums on how to use OpenEars with Swift and I’ve heard of no issues related to the framework – search for the keyword ‘Swift’ in the forums in order to read how to get started with your Swift 2.x projects), but as some OpenEars-using developers have noticed, I’ve been conservative about jumping in and dedicating the same support/documentation/packaging resources that I currently make available for Objective-C to Swift while its IDE stability and syntax was in flux and its tooling and debug capabilities were still emerging.

This has only been for practical reasons – support is very important to me, and time for everything related to support is in limited supply, so I wanted to make sure that supporting Swift simultaneously with Objective-C wouldn’t overextend support resources in a way that might reduce support quality across the board. This was particularly important because the already-shipped or nearly-shipping Objective-C apps which have tended to represent the majority of projects were consequently the support cases where the most was at stake for the most developers.

Due to the exhilarating community participation since the open-sourcing of Swift and the great communication out of the Swift team, I’m confident that supporting Swift in the future isn’t going to be a risk for giving good support to Objective-C projects, so I’m happy to announce that OpenEars and its plugins will receive official Swift support from Politepix for Swift 3 at the time of its release, including docs, tutorial, sample app, Swift-ready packaging, and forum support. As always, I hope this will help you make even more delightful speech-enabled apps!

-Halle