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Key points

There are three pieces of code worth looking at again before you continue on to project 13.

First, lets review the initializer for our custom Person class from project 10:

init(name: String, image: String) {
    self.name = name
    self.image = image
}

There are two interesting things in that code. First, we need to use self.name = name to make our intention clear: the class had a property called name, and the method had a parameter called name, so if we had just written name = name Swift wouldn’t know what we meant.

Second, notice that we wrote init rather than func init. This is because init(), although it looks like a regular method, is special: technically it’s an initializer rather than a method. Initializers are things that create objects, rather than being methods you call on them later on.

The second piece of code I’d like to review is this, taken from project 11:

if let touch = touches.first {
    let location = touch.location(in: self)
    let box = SKSpriteNode(color: UIColor.red, size: CGSize(width: 64, height: 64))
    box.position = location
    addChild(box)
}

We placed that inside the touchesBegan() method, which is triggered when the user touches the screen. This method gets passed a set of touches that represent the user’s fingers on the screen, but in the game we don’t really care about multi-touch support we just say touches.first.

Now, obviously the touchesBegan() method only gets triggered when a touch has actually started, but touches.first is still optional. This is because the set of touches that gets passed in doesn’t have any special way of saying “I contain at least one thing”. So, even though we know there’s going to be at least one touch in there, we still need to unwrap the optional. This is one of those times when the force unwrap operator would be justified:

let touch = touches.first!

The last piece of code I’d like to review in this milestone is from project 12, where we had these three lines:

let defaults = UserDefaults.standard
defaults.set(25, forKey: "Age")
let array = defaults.object(forKey:"SavedArray") as? [String] ?? [String]()

The first one gets access to the app’s built-in UserDefaults store. If you were wondering, there are alternatives: it’s possible to request access to a shared UserDefaults that more than one app can read and write to, which is helpful if you ship multiple apps with related functionality.

The second line writes the integer 25 next to the key “Age”. UserDefaults is a key-value store, like a dictionary, which means every value must be read and written using a key name like “Age”. In my own code, I always use the same name for my UserDefaults keys as I do for my properties, which makes your code easier to maintain.

The third line is the most interesting: it retrieves the object at the key “SavedArray” then tries to typecast it as a string array. If it succeeds – if an object was found at “SavedArray” and if it could be converted to a string array – then it gets assigned to the array constant. But if either of those fail, then the nil coalescing operator (the ?? part) ensures that array gets set to an empty string array.

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