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Daily Curiosity for iOS - The top 5 things to learn on Curiosity.com, delivered daily.

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Maker
One note: we built this app with Swift.
Very cool, Andy. With the announcement of Swift 2 and the number of changes, how do you look at the decision to build with Swift now? Do you anticipate tech debt time for your team to change syntax to fit Swift 2? Do you recommend others looking at building an iOS app start with Swift or Objective-C?
Maker
Thanks Eric! The path for the app development was: clickable prototype > PhoneGap prototype > decision point...Obj C or Swift. We didn't have an engineer on our team dedicated full time to Obj C and since Swift has some similarities to Javascript our lead designer and insanely talented engineer said "give me this week to dive into Swift" and so he did! We've been doing through the developer-perspectives of Swift 2 and we don't see any major hurdles with syntax updates. So many engineers are still staying with Objective-C from conversations we've had...but also many that haven't done Obj C development want to build iOS apps so they're taking another look. The open source developments with Swift show a different trend from Apple too, which is very interesting to see. Might open things up more!
Maker
Hi Eric. Very good question about Swift 2. Only time will tell. About a third of the way through the dev process we had to migrate from Swift 1.1 to 1.2 and XCode made that process completely painless. Grated that migration wasn't as big of a leap, but Apple promises to provide a similar migration tool in XCode7. Looking back on the decision to go Swift, for this team it was absolutely the right call. With either language, the biggest challenge is going to be learning iOS and all of it's APIs. Doing so in Swift made that so much easier because it's syntax felt so comfy. We needed to learn just enough ObjC to translate older StackOverflow answers, but with XCode's autocomplete magic that was no trouble at all. FWIW, I can't WAIT for Swift 2 and XCode7. 95% of our frustration with Swift in this process was XCode related crashes and compile issues. The other 5% were around Swift's error handling. Both seems to have been addressed in XCode7.
Maker
The end of this year and 2016 should be very different for Swift, that is for sure.
Maker
One thing that I didn't get a chance to mention yet, but the Hook Model () by and played a HUGE part in our initial thinking around this app. Ryan was even helpful enough to take a call from me a long time ago when we were first finding our way with Curiosity. We have the 'investment' stage coming up (many of our fans want to say "show me more space stuff!" for example).
Wow, ! I'm remembering our call now. That was so long ago. Great job w/ the app. 😀 's Hook Model is super helpful to think through and can often inspire new ideas. I'm meeting up with him Friday and looking forward to getting his thoughts on a big redesign of our mobile app.
Maker
Haha! Thanks Ryan! And thank you very much for your kind words about the app and everything you do with Product Hunt to make it a vibrant community. Days like this are intense. and I talked a lot about that feedback then and how to quickly iterate but keep things simple (always a challenge). Funny also: I emailed you earlier today (totally understand you are busy). Our head of partnerships I believe knows you as well. Your comment on Twitter is so right: the internet is small. And fun!
Made my day!
Hunter
Curiosity is a really neat idea that is both useful and entertaining. Learning about new things has never been this fun and easy. If only I could learn everything this way!
Maker
Thank you so much for this! We're really very happy that this app is out and people are giving us feedback.
Maker
Thanks for hunting us ! Hey everyone! Andy here from Curiosity: a team of engineers, designers and editors building what we think is the new happy place for lifelong learners. Our website was hunted over a year ago and we’ve been talking a lot with our audience of people all over the world about what they like. Curation and highlighting the coolest stuff we see was a key theme. In addition, half of our traffic is mobile and people have been clamoring for an app. Android is coming soon! Very soon. We promise. We’re very interested in your feedback about the approach of a finite digest every day as well as features you’d like to see!
I've used this app since it went into beta. It's well-designed with an attractive interface and a flexible engagement model (read a paragraph, or dive deep and watch a video), and the content is interesting. Congrats to the team on launching!
Maker
Thanks! We really appreciate the comment! We intentionally wanted to offer a product that didn't mandate that you watch a video to learn, because there are many circumstances when a video play just isn't feasible.
great execution! really sleek app ;)
Maker
Thanks! We really appreciate it! We share a lot of the same goals. Would love to connect.
Love the app and can't wait for when it becomes personalized to me and the subjects that I love to learn about.
Maker
Thanks ! We really appreciate the comment! We intentionally wanted to offer a product that didn't mandate that you watch a video to learn, because there are many circumstances when a video play just isn't feasible.
why this app was shut down, can you share the main reasons?
Maker
Curiosity was acquired by Discovery. Not 100% sure why the decided to shut down the app however.
Thanks for the reply Andy,appreciate it! I am in the process of building a learning app as well but it seems like learning is against human nature and users are more centered towards entertainment then to learn. Can you share some of the lessons you learned in the journey of building Curiosity that might be useful for beginners like me?