Additional observations:
@twoStraws notes in one of his videos that working with Dates is hard. Very hard.
I found a great resource, perhaps this will help you too?
See-> Working with Dates
In short, this video goes into great detail about parsing and formatting ISO dates and the tricky business of time zones.
Once you have a nice Date
object, you might want to show this date to your user! However, users in England, US, Germany, and Spain all use different formats! This video has great hints how to avoid hard coding various formats and to rely on a user's locale to solve the display problem.
Added bonus! Besides this excellent video, Ben created a terrific web site allowing you to interactively test different Swift date formats. See the results as you change format options! Cool.
See-> NSDateFormatter.com
Please report back if this helps!