Playgrounds

One of the threads that’s led me to learning iOS development is last year’s release of the Swift Playgrounds 4 app. I’ve long had a hankering for a tool to create IOS apps, and a few years ago invested a bit of time in Codea.

Playgrounds possibly started as a little live scratchpad for code in Xcode, but now it’s big news in STEM education for getting kids started on coding. It’s possible to create (and share) Playground “books” that lead users through steps in programming. Playgrounds is supplied with one that covers the beginnings of programing – functions, loops, conditions etc and many more are downloadable. This is actually one of the methods I’m using for picking up Swift basics – I can pick it up in any spare five minutes and solve a puzzle to progress my learning.

The release of Playgrounds 4 at the end of 2021 was a big step, since now it’s theoretically possible to fully develop an app and submit it to the app store from the iPad. That’s where I’ve started EasterDay. There’s also a Mac app, and the iCloud experience of moving between them is quite seamless.

I will move across to Xcode with this app soon though – I’m loving Playgrounds, but I’ve been remiss in writing unit tests and I should probably also work out how version control works in 2022.