Tomas Chlebek Since yesterday's presentation was the opening of the developer conference WWDC 2016, it was a big emphasis on the new possibilities for developers. At the end of the presentation, Apple also presented its own plan to significantly expand the number of people who understand programming languages.
It wants to do so with the help of a new iPad app called Swift Playgrounds. It will teach its users to understand and work with the Swift programming language, which was created by Apple and in 2014 released as open source, therefore available to everyone and free of charge.
During the live presentation, one of the first lessons that the application will offer was demonstrated. The game was shown in the right half of the display, the instructions in the left. The application at this point actually only requires the user to play the game - but instead of graphical controls, it uses lines of code that are prompted.
In this way, they will learn to operate with the basic concepts of Swift, such as commands, functions, loops, parameters, variables, operators, types, etc. In addition to the lessons themselves, the application will also contain a continuously growing set of challenges that will deepen the ability to work with already known concepts.
However, learning in Swift Playgrounds does not stop at the basics, which the Apple programmer demonstrated using the example of a self-created game where the physics of the world was controlled using the iPad's gyroscope.
Since the iPad does not have a physical keyboard, Apple has created a rich palette of controls. The "classic" software QWERTY keyboard itself, for example, in addition to the code whisperer, contains several characters on individual keys that are selected by various types of interaction with them (for example, a number is written by dragging the key up).
Frequently used code elements do not need to be written, just drag them from a special menu and drag again to select the code range to which they should be applied. After tapping on a number, only the numeric keypad will appear directly above it.
The created projects can be shared as documents with the extension .playground and anyone with an iPad and the Swift Playgrounds application installed will be able to open and edit them. Projects created in this format can also be imported into Xcode (and vice versa).
Like everything else introduced at yesterday's presentation, Swift Playgrounds is now available in developer, with the first public trial coming in July and the public release in the fall, along with iOS 10. All will be free.
I wonder if this will work on all ipads that will run ios10 or if it will be limited to newer devices.
This was some of the best news for me yesterday because I've always wanted to take a stab at programming in Swift and never really made the decision. This is how they did it in a playful way, so I'm really looking forward to the fall.
it's a bit of a shame that it will be limited to ipads only, but I assume that it will probably be possible to get around it virtually :)
And can it be downloaded at all? They said it's available for developers now, but I can't find it on their site O_o or through the appstore under iOS10?
Want to increase the number of developers in the world? So let the developer make the program cheaper :D