The Code Hub’s WWDC2020 Wishlist

At this stage, you can almost taste WWDC2020 and we’ve been talking with our students about what might come out of the sessions this week.

Since we’ve been immersed in Swift Playgrounds and Reality Composer for the last few months, I, for one, have a few things on my wish list for WWDC.

The Wish List

Here’s a brief list of things we’d love to see at WWDC:

Swift Playgrounds and Development on the iPad

  • New Swift Playgrounds challenges
    • I’m not saying our students are bored, but the existing content is so excellent and so well done, it would be amazing to get some more playgrounds during the week. I am an especially big fan of playgrounds like the Cipher playground that tell a story.
  • While we’re at it, The Code Hub Playgrounds in the official list of “More Playgrounds”
    • We’re not biased at all, but I’d personally love it if our playground feed was added to the app.
  • New Books
    • Again, I’m a huge fan of Everyone Can Code Puzzles, heck, we based an entire series on it. And the App Dev with Swift books are an incredible free resource to have. But I’d love to see the long-awaited Everyone Can Code Adventures ship!
  • More dev on iPad
    • Whether it’s Xcode on iPad or simply Swift syntax highlighting for Advanced > View Auxiliary Source Files in Swift Playgrounds, prepping folks for the full Xcode experience in Swift Playgrounds would be incredible…
  • Easier Playground Book Authoring
    • There is the Swift Playgrounds Author Template (for various versions of Xcode), which is a HUGE help. And it gets better every time they ship a new one for the new version of Xcode. But I would love to see 1) it announced more publicly (or at least to me 🙂 ) so I can go grab the latest one rather than keeping around older versions of Xcode and Swift to do my playground book authoring and 2) more integrated into Xcode itself, maybe as a template for new projects.

Reality Composer and ARKit

  • The ability to drag images as objects into Reality Composer on the iPad
    • Maybe you can do this somehow, but the only way I’ve found to drag images into a Reality Composer scene (as objects, not anchors) is to do it in Reality Composer on the Mac and then edit the Reality Composer project on iOS.
  • While we’re at it, movies as objects for Reality Composer
    • We can always jump back to Xcode to add an AVPlayerLayer and AVPlayerItem to our scene and layer it on top of an image anchor, ala Harry Potter’s Daily Prophet moving photos, but wouldn’t it be amazing if we could add it as an object in Reality Composer and tweak the way it’s laid out in Reality Composer’s interface?
  • More LiDAR!
    • I can’t wait until my students are all on the latest iPads with full-on LiDAR cameras on the back for playing around with our AR sessions.

WebObjects!

  • The Triumphant Return of WebObjects
    • Who wouldn’t like to see a new version of WebObjects ship; EOF, D2W and all? Enterprise Objects Framework for the desktop, anyone?

Like Christmas in June

The above is a short list of the things we’ve run into in the last few months. Of course, there are a few of them we can address ourselves.

Regardless of what we wind up getting, I’m excited for improvements to existing frameworks. I’m excited for the new technology the gang add this year.

The Swift Student Challenge was an impressive start to the event. I can’t wait to point my students at more inspiring content for them to consume and start dreaming up what they’ll do with it.

See you at the virtual Jamba Juice stand!

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