Erica Sadun

Where technology meets something or other

Swift Developer Challenge: Create a deck of cards

The deck-of-cards enumeration keeps coming up over and over again in #swift-lang because of the Swift Programming Language guided tour. I recently decided to create my own deck. I started on this because I wanted to test out some of GameplayKit features, namely shuffling, but also because I wanted to play a bit with CustomStringConvertible and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable.

My goal was actually to build card views, shuffle a deck, and fan out the results. What I found was that the Unicode deck characters won’t render properly to UIKit contexts, where GameplayKit is freely available, and will to OS X ones, where GameplayKit isn’t. (I’m still primarily on Yosemite, not El Capitan.)

I filed some radars, created a post, and put my implementation to the side. Then Maximilian tweeted.

So here’s a developer challenge. Have at the deck enumeration, have some fun, and share your implementation on github. When you’re ready to peek, here’s mine.

Tweet this Post

One Comment

  • Hello Erica,
    One question: Can you really shrink
    ——————————-

    var description: String {
      switch self {
      case .Spades:
        return "♠️"
      case .Clubs:
        return "♣️"
      case .Diamonds:
        return "♦️"
      case .Hearts:
        return "♥️"
      }
}

    ——————————-
    with:
    ——————————-

    var description: String {
        return ["♣️", "♦️", "❤️", "♠️"][rawValue - 1]
}

    ——————————
    can you link some documentation?
    Thank you for your work and your books, they are precious.

    • By Sabino