I've launched #colorBar

I've just launched a new app - it's a simple utility that allows you to see the colour on your screen under the mouse cursor. Go find more at colorbar.app or download at the Mac App Store.

It's been an excellent exercise in learning Swift and about the Mac App Store. Swift was my first introduction to a truly type-safe language and I've been enjoying it immensely. It makes you realise that if you're writing ? everywhere in your code, you're probably not doing it right, and as a result it's made my skills in other languages better. I now find myself writing more type-safe code in PHP and JavaScript (TypeScript) and I'm enjoying it.

If you've never tried a type-script language, I'd recommend starting on Swift. It's got a really shallow learning curve (at the start!) and it's a great language to learn the basics of type safety. Advanced features of strongly-typed languages are a little harder to learn, but the basics are easy to pick up and can be easily applied to other languages. Having typed code is a far safer way to write code in a way that you know what you're doing and what you're getting back from a function.

There's tons of useful tutorials out there for Swift, but I'd recommend starting with Hacking with Swift. It's a great resource for learning Swift and it's free. I've also found SwiftUI by Tutorials to be a great resource for learning SwiftUI for some other slightly more secret projects I'm working on.