Between NSDate, NSCalendar, NSDateFormatter and NSDateComponents, the iOS SDK provides a powerful system to operate on date and time values. The API however is a little verbose. Naoto Kaneko wrote a set of extensions for NSDate (and a few other types such as Int and String) in Swift, called Timepiece that makes date and time manipulate easier.

Creating new dates:

let now = NSDate()
let christmas = now.change(month: 12, day: 25)

Formatting:

5.minutes.later.stringFromFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:SS")

Parsing:

"1987-06-02".dateFromFormat("yyyy-MM-dd")

Comparison:

date < 1.year.ago

There's a Swift playground included with it, so you can check it out easily. To use it, open Timepiece.xcworkspace and then open Timepiece.playground from within the workspace.

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