Frequently Asked Questions

SwiftUI, of course! It is easier to use and faster to learn!

While both are important, you’ll progress as a Swift developer much faster by starting with SwiftUI.

No! Our courses are designed for people with no computer science or coding background. Anyone can learn for free!

Nick is a self-taught iOS Engineer. He learned to code 100% online and found that “learning to code” was much harder than it needed to be. He started Swiftful Thinking in an attempt to streamline the learning process to make it as easy as possible for new developers to learn.

Our courses focus on fundamentals and core concepts and provide a curated curriculum to go from beginner to advanced engineer!

The official course watch order is posted here.

If you’ve never written code before, start with the Swift Basics course.

The official course watch order is posted here. 

The courses are progressive and best watched in order!

Our courses are structured to be the fastest way to learn iOS. We use “progressive learning”, which means that the knowledge you learn will aggregate as you move through each course.

For example, you will learn something in Video 1 and then use that in Video 2. Then you will learn something in Video 2 and use that in Video 3.

This pattern continues until the end of each course and also from course-to-course. It allows you to learn new things and practice what you've already learned at the same time.

You can search for videos here or on YouTube.

1 - Subscribe on YouTube!

2 - Join our Discord!

3 - Follow on Twitter!

1 - Tips are highly appreciated via BuyMeACoffee!

2 - We have a paid course coming soon! Sign up for our email chain here for updates and discounts.

Yes, the source code for all courses is available for FREE on Github.

Yes, videos have been appended to the end of each course to cover anything substantial that has been deprecated or changed.

You will find a few deprecated methods which have not been updated. This is because the new methods are very similar to the deprecated methods and the warning should explain how to fix it.

There’s so much to learn in iOS that our recommendation is to continue using deprecated methods in the courses and keep moving forward. When Apple deprecates something, it will still work and compile for many years. Learning should be about understanding concepts and fundamentals and not focused on specific APIs.

You should think of “architecture” as a spectrum, where there are less complex and more complex patterns. The purpose of architecting your code is to make it more reusable, scalable, and organized. However, depending on the size of your app/team, the amount of “scaling” that you need differs greatly.

For smaller apps, you can build with little-to-no architecture and not have any problems. For larger teams, you will most likely want more separation of concerns between the files and layers of your app, as to avoid conflicts between teams and streamline your development process.

Most apps fall into first bucket, where no architecture or MVVM works well. This is what most of the Swiftful Thinking courses teach.

Larger apps should lean towards more architecture, where MVVM, VIPER, or TCA could be better suited.

No. While UIKit is still important to learn, new developers should focus their time on SwiftUI first. SwiftUI is easier to learn and is growing in popularity, while UIKit is declining.

Most of the apps in the App Store today are built on UIKit because they were built before SwiftUI was released. Therefore, many iOS jobs today still require knowledge of UIKit. However, many teams have already started refactoring their code into SwiftUI and are using SwiftUI when building new features!

A new developer will never be as good at UIKit as someone who has been building UIKit for 10+ years. However, new developers can get a jump-start by becoming an expert at SwiftUI, which is the skill that will be in higher demand in the future.

Our courses are for learning general iOS development, which is primarily for iPhone and iPad applications.

It may be surprising to new developers, but the consumer market and job market for MacOS, VisionOS, TvOS, & WatchOS is incredibly small when compared to iOS.

The reality is that most iOS developers will never need to build on these other platforms. However, the code that we are learning (Swift and SwiftUI) transfers to these platforms directly. So after learning iOS, it is very easy to pick-up and build for any other Apple platform!

Not yet! SwiftData is still very new and untested in production environments. It is built on top of CoreData, which is more important to learn for most iOS engineers & teams. You can search for Core Data videos here.

Color Literal was an easy way to add custom colors to your iOS application, however it is no longer supported in new versions of Xcode (we are also upset about this!). 

In newer versions of Xcode, it will still compile if you type: #colorLiteral( 

However, the recommended approach to add custom colors to your project is via the Assets folder. You can watch Nick do it here.

For most developers (especially new developers) watching the videos in order will help to avoid getting stuck or confused.

However, we recognize that not everyone wants to watch the courses in full. You can check out our blog to find mini-courses curated from the most important videos from the full courses.

For example, The SwiftUI Bootcamp has over 70+ videos, but this post highlights the 25 most important ones!