Apple’s celebrated free coding app, Swift Playgrounds, has just become more accessible with the release in the last few days of Swift Playgrounds for Mac. It’s a way of learning a coding language, to help you create an app for iPhone, iPad or even Android.
Apple's Swift Playgrounds is now available on the Mac.
Do you code? No, nor me.
Actually, maybe that was the wrong answer, many Forbes readers are tech-savvy and have doubtless coded, one way or another.
If you haven’t, like I hadn’t. then Swift Playgrounds may be a great way to start. It’s been around for a few years now, since 2016 in fact, on the iPad. Its gaudy colors and pleasing gamification have been working well at encouraging novices to learn the basics of coding and take on well-targeted and increasingly difficult challenges. Its visual style is engaging and you can choose between three adorable alien-looking creatures to help through mazes and puzzles which you solve by coding.
Apple CEO Tim Cook talks about the importance of teaching code in schools, saying it should be mandatory, like language learning. Hence the arrival of Swift as the coding language in Swift Playgrounds. Swift came before Playgrounds: released in 2014, Swift is a powerful, intuitive programming language that is easier to read and maintain. Swift Playgrounds was created to help anyone start learning the language.
It’s definitely aimed at children first but, make no mistake, is sophisticated enough to be beneficial for adults, too. I know I quickly found the lessons getting hard enough to be far from a pushover. That was when it was an iPad-only app.
Swift Playgrounds first appeared on the iPad
If it had a limitation, it was that, clever and enjoyable to learn though it is as a programming language, to create an app with Swift you need use Xcode, an integrated development environment which isn’t available on the iPad.
The new Swift Playgrounds Mac app could change all that.
It means that what you learn, what you code, in Swift on the Mac can be brought into Xcode, the professional tool for developers to build apps for the App Store. The same Mac you learn Swift on can be the vehicle for creating an App Store app in Xcode.
What’s more, there are certain advantages on the Mac, such as a physical keyboard instead of the virtual onscreen one on the iPad. And the fact that on the Mac, you can resize the windows on screen so you have more room available for your code. Or code suggestions in the form of code-completion views (think of them like AutoComplete when you’re typing a text) to make code creation quicker. And, on the MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar offers commands so your fingers stay on the keyboard while you create.
It’s been developed as part of Catalyst, the initiative designed to create apps which can work on both iPad and Mac. So, with the new Swift Playgrounds, what you do on an iPad is seamlessly transferred to the Mac, and the same in the opposite direction.
Writing code isn’t for everyone, and there’s still that little problem of coming up with the idea for your perfect app, but this is a big step forward.
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