[HN Gopher] Swift Playgrounds 4 ___________________________________________________________________ Swift Playgrounds 4 Author : tosh Score : 108 points Date : 2021-12-15 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.apple.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com) | garmaine wrote: | My kids love Swift Playgrounds. It is a wonderful way to | introduce young kids to programming, in a safe and exciting | environment. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | I think that Swift Playgrounds is a really neat idea (especially | the books thing). | | That said, I don't really have much interest in it, for myself. I | am stuck in the dark world of Xcode. | | What I would like (and have submitted the idea to Apple as a | feature request), is to have a playground as an Xcode project | target. I want to be able to link in modules and resources, | without editing the playground file by hand. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | The biggest new features with version 4 are (according to Apple): | | - Build iPhone and iPad apps with SwiftUI right on your iPad | (requires iPadOS 15.2 or later) | | - App Store Connect integration lets you upload your finished app | to the App Store | | - App Preview shows live updates as you make changes to your app | | - Full-screen preview lets you see your app edge-to-edge | | - Smart, inline code suggestions help you write code quickly and | accurately | | - App Projects make it easy to move projects to Xcode and back | | - Project-wide search finds results across multiple files | | - Snippets Library provides hundreds of SwiftUI controls, | symbols, and colors | | - Swift Package support lets you include publicly-available code | to enhance your apps | tosh wrote: | first impressions by Steve Troughton-Smith: | | > I can already tell that Swift Playgrounds 4 is a big deal. It | is pretty much exactly what I was hoping for from an 'Xcode for | iPad', more than just an upgrade to previously slow & clunky | Playgrounds app. It dramatically reframes what iPad is capable of | even in this first offering | | https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/14712166828070502... | | https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/14711965734177587... | ryeights wrote: | Why drop the 'the' before iPad? Sounds like someone's drank the | marketing Kool-Aid | mcphage wrote: | Twitter character limits | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Twitter limits; and also because it's not just marketing | Kool-Aid. It's "Word for iPad," "Angry Birds for Android," | "Kindle for Windows" and so forth. Not "Word for the iPad," | "Angry Birds for the Android," or "Kindle for the Windows." | Engineering-MD wrote: | For iPadOS makes sense. For iPad less so. | throwaway946513 wrote: | Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your | perspective, the only method to acquire iPadOS is to use | an iPad - so the designation seems fitting. | PhilipVinc wrote: | So now we can program on the iPad, but only with Apple's approved | language, on its approved ide. Can't a government go there and | knock the wall down? | kmeisthax wrote: | There's actually a whole host of iPad apps that will give you | programming environments for Python, JavaScript, and so on. iSH | will give you a full x86 Linux box and a-Shell supports | compiling and running WASM/WASI binaries in a simulated shell | environment. They've been around for some time, too; Apple | _really_ does not give these things the fanfare they deserve. | | The main wall that I can see needing to be knocked down would | actually be technical, not political. Something like OAMA[0] | absolutely would not fix the lack of JIT entitlements or | virtualization support accessible to third-party developers in | iPadOS. I would not be surprised if Swift Playgrounds is either | relying on lots of Apple-only entitlements or compromising on | performance[1]. If we had proper virtualization, then we | wouldn't need iSH; we could load up a real Linux distro and run | a LAMP stack or Docker containers on iPads. | | [0] Open App Markets Act; similar provisions were in the EU | Digital Markets Act at one point | | [1] The screenshots I'm seeing suggest that, at a minimum, your | code runs in the same sandbox as the editor. Which means Apple | hasn't added any sort of private API that would let Swift | Playgrounds properly provision your app. Without a JIT | entitlement, the editor would also need to include an AArch64 | emulator inside itself in order to provide the App Preview | feature. These sorts of things won't matter to casual | programming use-cases but would kill a lot of the benefits of | an on-device development environment. | Koshkin wrote: | Apple has a natural monopoly on Apple's products. | mattcwilson wrote: | Swift Playgrounds has been around for quite some time. | | I'd also hesitate to think of it as a way to "program on an | iPad." It's a slimmed down IDE + visualization pane intended to | be an educational environment for people wanting to learn | programming fundamentals, Swift specifically, or how to program | one of the robots/drones/programmable devices that have a | companion lessonbook. | zepto wrote: | That's what it was before this update. | | Now it is a full development tool that lets you release | commercial apps. | zepto wrote: | Why not just buy a tablet from someone else if you don't want a | managed environment? | | Apple is not the only tablet maker. | wly_cdgr wrote: | On what grounds? It's their platform | dangoor wrote: | https://codea.io and others have been around longer than Swift | Playgrounds. | m12k wrote: | That gem collection game looks like a fairly direct rip-off of | https://lightbot.com/ If you have kids that you'd like to | introduce to some programming concepts in a fun way, I highly | recommend it. | qwertyuiop_ wrote: | What happened to Swift on sever ? Looks like Rust sucked the air | out of Swift in recent years. | TulliusCicero wrote: | Used Swift Playgrounds with my then 8 year old, it was neat | except that it was actually pretty buggy. The game would get into | a bad state somewhat often. | gjsman-1000 wrote: | I've messed with it and my initial impressions are very | positive... except that I've managed to find one bug, and that's | that my experimental app appears in Siri App Suggestions and | can't open because, well, that app isn't actually installed. | | Maybe for iPadOS 15.2.1? | mhh__ wrote: | Swift playgrounds is really cool and all (I _really_ want to copy | it for D!) but when can I build GCC on my iPad. The things so | fucking fast but I basically only watch movies and read pdfs. | neals wrote: | How's swift doing as a language? Is it being adopted by | developers in a way Apple was hoping? | mrtksn wrote: | Not too much seems to be happening outside of Apple ecosystem | but it should because it's brilliant. I don't want to write in | any other language. | spyremeown wrote: | No idea, but the compiler engineers are wizards. | [deleted] | Kon-Peki wrote: | One feature of Swift Playgrounds that really doesn't get as much | attention as it deserves is the Swift Playground Book [1] | subscription: | | > You create content for the Swift Playgrounds app by writing | playground books. Like traditional books, playground books are | made up of chapters and pages. Unlike traditional books, they | include executable Swift code that displays the results live, | right on the page. | | > Swift Playgrounds subscriptions, like podcasts, are a sequence | of episodic content arranged in an order that builds knowledge | while allowing more advanced learners to skip content. | Subscriptions exist on the internet as feeds--downloadable lists | of items that apps and websites can deal with. You publish a set | of playgrounds as a feed that the Swift Playgrounds app can | download, process, and display. | | You publish them on your own website, via a JSON feed. No App | Store review needed. You could treat it like a Jupyter Notebook, | or an interactive story world - whatever you want. | | [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift_playgrounds | elliekelly wrote: | This is so fun! And you're right, I had no idea even though I | tinker around in playgrounds a bit. Thanks for sharing! | AceJohnny2 wrote: | "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", anybody? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age | haunter wrote: | Unfortunately Google shelved it but they had a very similar | project called Game Builder for Windows | | Here is the original introduction video | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Mf_XEZq-A | | And a tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1hpFRztQGY | | Got open sourced so you can still download it | https://github.com/googlearchive/gamebuilder | | Works perfectly under Linux with Wine or Proton. | | The last full Steam release is also included if you don't want to | compile it (7z.001-7z.002-7z.003) | https://github.com/googlearchive/gamebuilder/tree/master/bui... | | It's really fun and worth a try if you are looking for something | similar not on Mac | slmjkdbtl wrote: | Does anyone have personal experiences of seeing beginner using | Swift Playground to learn to code and understanding programming | ideas? How effect is it? How ready are they to enter "actual | programming" after completing the playground? | marstall wrote: | my 9 year old son loves it - he's learned basic programming | ideas in it for sure - loops, functions, etc. gives him a sense | of accomplishment and we do it together which is nice. | KarlKemp wrote: | At least the previous iteration so much about "completing" | anything. It didn't use the gamification-like mechanisms | ("challenges"). And it was not "not real" programming. It left | out a lot of the complexity of a project and focused on writing | source code, the very heart of the definition of programming. | | I use them the way I use the REPL in languages that have it: to | quickly try out an idea, or to improvise some single-purpose | one-off data munging. | mattcwilson wrote: | I worked for an edu tech startup that built a series of | playgroundbooks for learning robotics programming. | | It is a solid, top-tier learning environment for kids and | beginners. Apple has high standards for content you produce | in a playgroundbook if you want to be in the main | subscription set. And that pays off big time in the lesson | sizes, the consistency, and the accessibility of the material | no matter which publisher ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-15 23:00 UTC)