Computer Science Education Week - an initiative to encourage K-12 students to learn about computer science - is December 7-13, 2015. As a speech-language pathologist who learned how to code iOS apps, I fully support the initiative. I think there are very fun and rewarding opportunities in the world of computer programming. And even if students have no desire to become computer programmers, they can still learn lifelong skills including creativity, logic, and problem solving through coding. For the past two years, my students (middle school and high school ages) and I participated in the hour of code as part of CSED Week. We did the Angry Birds puzzles (ages 4+) that involve dragging-and-dropping "blocks of code" via a visual programming language in order for the red bird to capture the [...]

// Use two forward slashes for a single-line comment /* Use a forward slash followed by an asterisk to start a multi-line comment. To end the multi-line comment, use an asterisk followed by a forward slash. */ /* Did you know it's also possible to nest comments in Swift? /* You can nest comments by starting a multi-line comment, then starting another. */ Finally, close the last (two) comments */ These examples demonstrate how to write different types of comments in Swift. As you might be aware, Swift is a new OS X and iOS programming language announced this week at WWDC. After hearing the announcement, I immediately wanted to check it out because I enjoy coding iOS apps, even though I’m only a beginner (experienced programmers write a large majority of the code in our company’s[...]

Today marked the first day of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, CA. As always, there was great speculation about what major announcements Apple would make today. While some of the long desired items, such as the iWatch or iTV, were not announced, some exciting updates to Apple’s OS X and iOS software were revealed. Here is a look at our favorite highlights, as well as a more comprehensive list of the changes coming soon. For Mac users, there are some really exciting new features coming to our computers in the fall with OS X Yosemite. Our favorite is the capability to answer and make phone calls on your Mac computer. Apple demonstrated this ability at the WWDC Keynote by calling their new business partner Dr. Dre from a Mac computer. You can call a p[...]