WWDC21 Wish List

Last year we had a little wish list for WWDC, so I figured I would take a look at what we’d love to see today.

Last Year

Well, first, what did we get last year?

From our list, we did wind up getting new books, a whole load of them! Some didn’t ship during WWDC, but now we have Develop in Swift Fundamentals, Develop in Swift Explorations, Develop in Swift Data Collections, Everyone Can Code Adventures. That’s quite a lot of stuff to read through!

We even now have a huge resource in the App Design Workbook, which introduces app design process as well as a bit of SwiftUI in Playgrounds to keep you busy.

One thing on our wishlist was more dev on iPad, and Swift Playgrounds is still getting a lot of love, which is excellent, and getting more interesting with each release on both the Mac and iPad.

This Year’s Wish List

Okay, so what would we love to see this year?

Obviously I’m biased towards things that will help us teach coding, but I’ve got a few more this year I’d love to see under the proverbial WWDC Tree.

Swift Playgrounds

  • I would love to see an easier way to author Swift Playgrounds (like last year). I’ve run two sessions on creating Swift Playground Books, one with the Swift Playground Author Template and one by copying an existing playground book.
  • I loved the sessions on Swift Playgrounds last year, in particular the first in the Swan’s Quest series. It would be amazing to see more this year. Using those sensors is pretty amazing and eye-opening for a lot of students.
  • A Swift Playgrounds Community site: some sort of way to easily share Swift Playgrounds with students, fellow developers, where you can just show off your work easily, would be amazing. Think of it like a dynamic Swift Playground feed people could publish to easily from within the Swift Playgrounds app…

Xcode and teaching Develop in Swift

  • If Xcode had a remote sharing option, so the teacher or co-coder could observe one person typing, that would be an amazing addition to teaching coding. It’d be icing on the cake if we got the same with iPads and Swift Playgrounds, and I need to have a look at the Classroom app update to see if maybe that’s already done.
  • Some of these collaboration features would be a real boon to teaching people how to code, especially in as rich an environment as Xcode, so any more integration with Github, remote sharing, and the rest would be much appreciated
  • A web-based version, for those folks who want to try out Swift and app development, would also be amazing. I really like repl.it, especially with its implementation of the Swift REPL and readLine()… but it never hurts to have more options.

RealityKit and Reality Composer

  • Lastly, and by no means is this an exhaustive list, I would really, really love to see the ability to support more than one image anchor in a Reality Composer scene. We’ve had a few questions lately about supporting them inside the one Reality Scene… and while there are ways to handle this (multiple scenes for each image anchor you want to support, using code and loading ARImageAnchors yourself), this would be a really fun addition to an incredible app. Reality Composer makes it so easy to create engaging, robust experiences with very little to no code already, but a few additions would just ice the cake.

Now You

WWDC21

That’s our list, what do you want to see from WWDC21?

Teaching Develop in Swift Online – June Edition

We’re going to be back (online) teaching you how to teach the Develop in Swift material — Explorations, Fundamentals, and Data Collections — in June!

If you’re an educator thinking about teaching Swift and app development (or already doing it), this is a really fun, packed week.

Coming June 21st!

We’ll be holding hands-on workshops, lectures from the books, special sessions, and some takeaway projects you can run with your own classrooms.

Teaching App Development with Swift runs from 21-25 June 2021, from 8am to 16:30, Irish time, each and every day. You get a chunk of time in the middle of the day to work on your projects and finish anything you were working on in the workshops. And then in the afternoons we have some app showcases planned, where you can show off your work!

You can register here, and it’s all free.

We’ve brought back some old favorites and added some new activities that I really think you’ll like, so hopefully we’ll see you online!

Teaching and Presenting with Keynote

When I’m teaching teachers how to teach coding we spend a lot of time in Keynote.

The excellent Develop in Swift series, from Apple, comes with a whole set of keynote files for presenting nearly every lesson in the book. If you download the teacher materials from the Teacher Guide, you’ll find the slides, presenter notes, animations in the keynote files already, as well as Xcode playground-based labs for your students to try.

Now, if you’re new to the Mac, you might to be super familiar with Keynote. So I’ve put together a short video which you can watch below, or you can head off to YouTube, to help you orient yourself in Keynote.

I show you how to present on a Mac with only one screen so you can see your presenter notes, too. If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you might want to watch the Using Keynote Remote to Present video to see how to use the Keynote app on your device to remote control your Mac’s presentation.

If you’ve got all that down, but need help sharing your screen over WebEx, well, I’ve got a video for that, too.

Of course, if you’re new to the Mac or Keynote you’ll still need to get some hands-on practice, but at the very least this video above will start you out on the right foot!

Creating Xcode Playgrounds

On the back of our Swift Playground series, I created a quick video to show you how to create an Xcode Playground, like the ones you would use if you’re taking (or teaching) the Develop in Swift material.

You can watch it below or head off to YouTube:

You’ll find out how to create additional pages for your Xcode playground and how to create links between them so students can navigate.

Playgrounds are a great tool for teaching. The markup you’ll see in this brief video will show you how to author some of your own.

A few links from the video: