![[Cobalt Matters] Talking About the New Features in Swift 4](https://www.cobaltsign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobalt-Sign-Cobalt-Matters-Swift-4.jpg)
What is “Cobalt Matters”?
Staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends is important to us. We are organising internal talks and workshops to share, learn and test all the news and announcements related to app development.
We chose the name Cobalt Matters because the term “matter” fits well with most of its meanings:
- In science, matter is the term for any type of material. Matter is anything that has mass and takes up space. At a minimum, matter requires at least one subatomic particle, although most matter consists of atoms.
- A subject or situation under consideration.
- As a verb, meaning something that is important.
During our first “Cobalt Matters” discussion, we went through the new features of Swift 4. We airplayed some playground projects on the TV to be able to test them, share our opinions and see how they may change the way we work.
New Features in Swift 4
We’ve looked at some of the new features of Swift 4 in action. Migration to Swift 4 is a very important matter for us, as it will affect all of our projects and we need to know how big the impact is, considering the migration to Swift 3 was not so smooth.
We are happy about some of them:
- String is back to being a Collection, which comes with a lot of advantages we were used to
- Serialization – a long-awaited feature from developers who worked with to Java or .NET
- Dictionaries and Sets
- Swift 4 now supports multi-line strings
- NSNumber bridging: overflows are now set to “nil”
- One-sided ranges
Some of them are did not make such a big impression:
- Wireless debugging: this seems like a nice to have feature, but if the deployment time is too long, we will not really consider using it. From our test with one of our apps it really took too long to open it on an iPad.
- Private Access Modifier
All in all, we like the new update in Swift but we were expecting a larger set of features. Stay tuned for the upcoming talking sessions about news & announcements regarding app development.
![[Cobalt Matters] Advice for Remote Working](https://www.cobaltsign.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Cobalt-Matters-Remote-Working-CoverFeatured-600x403.jpg)
