It seems nice but has a few UI bugs that make it very frustrating to use. Anytime you are typing and the keyboard is showing then you tap on the screen to move the cursor the keyboard disappears and you have to go and make it show again. This really slows down editing. Also seems to disappear at some point after pressing Enter after lines.
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iOS 10: Taking a Closer Look at Apple's 'Swift Playgrounds' for iPad
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Yep. I'm actually looking forward to using it myself.
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It won't be released in public for about 3 more months. So it's premature, and technically a violation of Apple's Developer Program terms to comment on its stability, or lack thereof.
I'm a VB hack, I know my way around VB in excel mostly but also as integrated into 2D and 3D modeling software. However, I've never been able to grasp the next level of making a game or something more interactive. I'm stuck on just doing calculations on user input and displaying the results or manipulating files.
I think this will be great to help me learn not only that aspect of it but what the heck classes and crap like that is. At least I hope it will be. It looks like even in beta the response is decent and I hope that sentiment continues. This is one of those really cool things that may have flown much under the radar.
I think this will be great to help me learn not only that aspect of it but what the heck classes and crap like that is. At least I hope it will be. It looks like even in beta the response is decent and I hope that sentiment continues. This is one of those really cool things that may have flown much under the radar.
Have you ever used Rosetta Stone before? I don't mean to compare the two directly, I just mean that I happen to find Rosetta Stones approach to be useful, it works to help me learn. Does this app seem to compare in terms of ease of learning? (If you've ever used Rosetta?) Thanks. I know zero about coding / programming and would like to start somewhere.
This looks cool. Interested to share this with my kids and see if they like it. Although they are still kind of young. My son asks what I do for work and I try to tell him, you know the apps you play with on the iPad sometimes, well dad makes things like those....but I mostly just get blank stares. =]
I guess that's what the audience during the WWDC keynote expected when Tim Cook started to talk about Swift Playgrounds. When they then realised it's an educational app for kids, their faces became longer and longer…
Yes. This is essentially a proof of concept that xcode on ipad could work. They will now kill two birds with one stone: get a bunch of youngsters to learn swift, and beta-test the programming keyboard and UI.
It's more than that - at the moment it teaches Swift and programming concepts and also serves as a way for experienced developers to write and test Swift code without having access to Xcode.
In one sense it is XCode for iPad. Not the XCode we want but it is a start.
What would be the bomb would be to bring Swift Scripting to IOS apps. Playgrounds could be extended to support this easily. More than anything else Mac OS and IOS need a modern scripting solution for apps, Swift makes a lot of sense here.
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Playgrounds and XCode already exist on the Mac. I don't see much stopping people from making a similar solution.
What do you base this on? Having experience with XCode and Playgrounds on the Mac I'm pretty sure you will want modern hardware simply for acceptable performance. That and it is very likely this is all modern 64 bit code.
Actually kids are pretty aware of poor performance in software and get turned off by it.
Right, which is why all the schools are using Chromebooks now.
I'm not sure what your argument is here -- that it's better kids not use Playgrounds at all than use it on less than prime iPad? Most schools do not have boatloads of $ to spend on the latest iPads. So it's either use it on what they have or not at all. Which is the better outcome?Also, most kids get turned off by a lot of things in school. Does that mean they should be exempted from learning it?
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Right, but bottom line it's a teaching tool, not a code editor. You make it sound like language learning systems like Rosetta Stone are not sophisticated or used for serious purposes. But in fact the U.S. State department uses it to teach diplomatic staff the native language of the country they will be working in.
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No reason for the long face.
Playgrounds for iPad, in order to compile for the REPL and link with UIKit, contains probably over 90% of the code and other stuff needed to do Xcode app builds of Swift code directly on an iOS device. So this Playground allows Apple to get lots of feedback (on the editor, etc.) and do some debugging, while finishing up the last few percent. And to do so without having having lots of buggy real apps created while still getting user input and polishing the result.
Basically, it's Xcode for iOS (Swift only), deliberately without the final optimize, archive and code-signing steps.
And a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given that the iPad Pro is more powerful than all the MacBooks used to create the first half million apps for the iOS App Store.
I hate this too. The iPad of choice for kids has always been the iPad 2, given its relatively low cost and similar feature set to newer iPads. It does have a slower processor, which is noticeable on some apps, and I suspect with the 3D environment that's what may be preventing use on iPad 2's. Still sad, 'cause I know my 7 and 6 year olds would love to play with this. Maybe it's time to spring for new machines, which again would be easier if they offered some lower-cost entries.
iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, combined with this and other education focused updates this past year does seem to make iPad the ultimate education tool; especially if Apple can offer steep discounts to get the whole package to around $500 to better compete with cheap Chromebooks.