New Content! SwiftUI App Walk-Through in Swift Playgrounds

Well, it’s been a long time, but we finally have some new coding resources for you!

*But* you’ll have to toggle one little switch to make sure it works well for you, especially if your iPad or Mac is set to something other than English as its first language. We’ll get to that in a second, though.

SwiftUI App Walk-Through

For those of you who have been keeping up to date with Swift Playgrounds, you might have seen that it now supports these amazing walk-throughs in the app on the iPad (and Mac) that help introduce you to code.

And, like we did with Swift Playground Books, we can even author our own!

It’s a way to guide a student through an app and help them figure out how to either accomplish a task in an app or see how you did it.

Apple has some great examples that will show you how to make all sorts of magic, and if you look at the App Gallery you’ll learn how to perform animations in SwiftUI, configure your app’s navigation, build up views, and more.

Drawing Flags

A really fun activity to explore composing views is to look at the flags of the world and try and re-create them with simple colors… in some cases we can get more complex and start to add shapes like circles, triangles, stars.

In fact, there’s an exercise you can perform outlined in the App Design Workbook, which I’ve talked about before.

From the App Design Workbook, by Apple

I love that we have a good suite of exercises to practice our layout capabilities at our fingertips!

So I came up with a walk-through app called Drawing Flags. You can download it from the Code Hub Adventures feed in Swift Playgrounds, which you can subscribe to here (for free):

Subscribe to Adventures

The goal is to fill in implementations for as many flags as you possibly can.

The walk-through, which you access through the library icon in the top right toolbar of Swift Playgrounds, will show you how to make an Irish flag, and then how to make a Dutch flag.

You’ll learn to add cases to a switch statement, you’ll learn how to create new files to create your flag view in. You will make your flags look more polished by using view modifiers.

I would love to hear how you get on with it, so definitely send me feedback, as it’s a work-in-progress and we’ll have plenty of challenges coming soon.

Non-English Languages

The one issue, at the moment, is that you might see the following if you have your iPad set to something other than English, as the main language:

A screenshot of Drawing Flags in Swift Playgrounds with some errors in the walk-through pane.

You can fix this, for now, by turning on Author Debug mode in Swift Playgrounds.

** If you prefer video, the instructions/walk-through for this process is available in this video.**


Open up the Settings app on your iPad.

Scroll down to the bottom of the tableview on the left of your iPad (if you’re in a left-to-right language locale).

You should see an item in there for Playgrounds. Tap to open it.

There’s a switch you can toggle above the version information for Author Debug Mode. Turn that switch on. Then try reloading the Drawing Flags app in Swift Playgrounds and you should be good to go!

Enable Modalità creazione debug on your Italian iPad

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