Hey, everyone! I'm Josh Brown and I co-created this course. I'd love to answer any questions you have about how it works -- or about REST & JSON in Swift in general.
Here's one of our most common questions so far:
> What medium is this course in? Youtube? PDFs that I can read through?
The lessons come via email, and we're going to have a Live Q&A chat on GrokSwift.com towards the end of the course.
We've put a lot into this, and we hope you love it!
If you're talking about either the bad (pyramid of doom) code in Myth #1 - or the good code there, then it is indeed protecting against null values in the JSON. When you try to cast with `as? String`, it returns nil when there's a null value in the JSON and the code in the `if` block is skipped (and the `else` block is executed if one exists).
I totally agree that comparing a cup of coffee to an app is ridiculous, even if they cost the same. And I think you're right - it's because a cup of coffee is a known thing.
Eventually, yes, most users upgrade. But Apple's stats showed about 6% of users still on iOS 5 a full year after iOS 6 was released. I'd imagine we'll see similar numbers with users going from iOS 6 to 7 - lots of them won't upgrade for a full year, and some will never upgrade. Mixpanel is currently showing 36% of users on iOS 6 - that's not an insignificant number. I'll be supporting iOS 6 for probably another year.