Well, it’s finally here: Swift Playgrounds 4.0!
You can now build entire apps on your iPad and ship them to the App Store. This is a huge update and there’s a ton of great content to go with the update that will teach you how to build apps (with SwiftUI, even!).
Go check it out and I’m sure I’ll have some walk-throughs for you soon!
While you’re waiting, with bated breath, for Swift Playgrounds 4.0 to ship, you might be playing around with Swift Playgrounds, whether it’s on a Mac or on an iPad.
This app and Swift Playgrounds (and Swift Playground Books, which we can author, ourselves — see our two videos on authoring playgrounds with the author template and by copying another book) are amazing tools for teaching coding.
But we talk a lot about prototyping when we talk about building apps. The App Design Workbook and App Design Journal teach you how to use Keynote to prototype an app experience quickly so that you can prove out your ideas and flow before you pour out the blood, sweat, and tears on the actual app.
This saves us from a lot of work that might be for nothing if our core idea isn’t all its cracked up to be. Prototypes let us figure out if there’s something there and whether it’s worth investing the time to develop the idea out into an actual app.
Well, the same thing applies when you’re building Swift Playgrounds and especially Playground Books. These are like stories and games and instruction all bundled into one package, so of course there’s a lot of complexity there.
I created a little Keynote theme that might help you storyboard out your Swift Playground Books, which you can download from here. Simply download that file an unzip it and double-click it, and it’ll install the template for you to use when you create new Keynote files.
It’ll give you a title screen first, and when you add new slides to the presentation you should choose the Playground Prototype slide type, and it’ll give you an area for prose in the upper left hand corner, an area below for code students might run on that particular page, and a dummy live view on the right hand side where you can sketch out what the code drives.
This way, just like an app, you can storyboard out your whole book experience and see how people will flow through the book. You can pinpoint what coding techniques you want to show off or teach or enable on a given page, as well as any instruction or story you might tell on each page.
Hopefully you find this useful, like I have!
