Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge I felt were really interesting from a CS perspective, when thousands of years in the future you have billions of lines of code running ships, etc. that no one exactly knows how it works anymore, code archaeologists, etc.
A completely different suggestion: Neither - learn C# and use Xamarin. Lower learning curve than both Swift and Objective-C, you can port your apps to other platforms more easily, and your new skill will be applicable across paradigms beyond iOS development.
1) Your app is now tied for life to a third-party vendor.
2) There's is a steep yearly licensing fee. (starting at 300 USD PER developer, PER platform).
3) Xamarin Forms is notoriously buggy if you're looking to also use it for cross-platform UI code.
4) It's debatable how much easier C# is to learn than Swift.
I wouldn't advice Xamarin to someone who wants to learn to write apps for iOS.
Xamarin in great but it makes most sense to use in a professional environment where a single app needs to be target at multiple platforms. Usually developers using Xamarin already have a great understanding of iOS and Android (and Windows?) before they start using Xamarin.
I think for someone new to developing apps it would be too much of an abstraction.
Well yeah, there are numerous different approaches one can take. You could also build hybrid apps if you're familiar with HTML&CSS, you could use RubyMotion if you're a Ruby dev, etc. :)
Which would be long overdue. DirectXTK looks neat but so far it's no replacement for the bits of XNA I've used. And with all the uncertainty I'd like to see something very official in big, shiny writing to convince me any new MS game development offering is futureproof enough to bother learning.
No disrespect to Shawn Hargreaves, whose work I've been enjoying since discovering Allegro 15 years ago. I'm interested to see whatever he produces post-XNA and glad of the reminder to check his blog more often.
I really enjoy the wp7 platform - developing apps is a cakewalk compared to iOS / Android and fragmentation is nonexistent. As a user of both iOS and wp7... wp7 just has a better overall user experience, it's not massive - but it's many small incremental improvements that add up.
Here's their problem: the carrier / retail ecosystem for WP7 sucks in the US. It's clear that they don't have any carriers truly on board except for AT&T... which is easily the worst carrier in my area (Chicago) in terms of both reliability and pricing.
Verizon has ONE crap Windows Phone, the HTC Trophy - possibly the worst Windows Phone available. So that's a no go. Sprint also has a single crappy phone. T-Mobile has a whole two phones - Lumia 710 (a crap version of the Lumia 900), and the HTC Radar - which is actually pretty nice, but hobbled by only 8GB of built-in storage. Even then, go to any of those stores and you'll have a rep trying to sell you an Android phone when you walk in the door. Check their websites and you'll see WP7 phones are at the very bottom.
Priority #1 should be fixing their retail/carrier ecosystem. The platform is fantastic, and there are some damn good phones too - but you're screwed unless you're on AT&T.
