Every variable can be declared as a so-called optional in Swift. As an optional, the variable is allowed to become nil what is equivalent to the absence of a value.  Hint: This post has been updated to Swift 3 Optionals If you have a variable that is not an optional,

Swift 2.0 has a new way of error handling. It uses a do-try-catch  syntax,  which is the replacement for NSError .  In this post we will discuss how to use this new syntax. Defining an error Before  an error can be thrown or catched, it must be defined. You can

Some people love it, some people hate it – but in the end everybody uses it: the singleton pattern. It is used if just one instance of an object is desired. For example, that could be a database connection.  You can design a singleton in Swift as follows: import Foundation private

One year ago Apple introduced Swift, which was a very surprising move.  What remains after one year?   The euphoria about Swift vanished after a short time due to the instability of Xcode 6.0, because there were a lot of crashes and blackouts of the autocompletion. Everyone who worked with

defer is another new keyword in Swift. With this statement you can declare clean-up code, that is executed just before the current scope ends. For example, this scope can be a function or a loop. Let’s take a look at an example: func aTestFunction(a:Int) { //lots of code.

In Swift 2, there is a new keyword for handling the control-flow of a block of code. It guarantees, that a specific condition holds true for the further code. Otherwise, it ensures that the following code will not be executed. Let us start with a simple example. Imagine you have