The Code Hub

We’ll see you all at 1pm today, Irish time, for something a little bit new!

Come back with us to assembling your camera! Live at 1pm, Irish time on Twitch!

Recap: Build an App in Swift Playgrounds

We may be done with live coding our aquarium app, but hopefully you’re not! There’s so much more you could do with the tools and techniques we’ve used over the last few days.

We added an array to track the number of ducks someone might add to our aquarium. Then we added a function to a button to line the ducks up as if someone threw bread in the aquarium for them.

Not bad for a week’s worth of work! Well, if you add all the time you’ve spent already, learning about Swift, you’ve definitely spent more than a week!

Now, you may not have gotten this far. We covered a LOT of topics and wrote a lot of code. Go back over the whole Build an App Aquarium series and catch up on parts you feel you might have missed.

If you didn’t quite get the rough contact testing we did, go back to that video and give it a re-watch. That might be a key for your app or game.

This has been a lot of material to digest. What we’ll see is that sometimes it makes sense to go back over previous code you’ve written to really understand it.

Today’s Session

The plan for today’s session is to go back to the Assemble Your Camera playground.

We were nearly done with building out our camera, so we’re going to finish it off over the next few days.

We’ll use the App class to organize our code, and maybe this will give us some ideas about how we can better organize our app or game from the App at Home playground.

In fact, when we review the code on the MyCamera class that notifies inputs of an image having been taken, you might start thinking about ways you could use that technique in your own game. Maybe for a fish that communicates with other fish in its school. Or in a squadron of enemy ships, when one gets near the player’s ship, notifies the others of their location.

You’ll be able to look back over a lot of the code you’ve written and begin to apply new things you’re learning. Or maybe just new things you’re appreciating, now that you’ve had a bit of experience coding.

See you at 1pm!

We’re back at 1pm today, Irish time! Come build an app with us, exercise those creative muscles!

The story so far

We’ve been building out an app using the techniques we learned in Everyone Can Code Puzzles and the Lights, Camera, Code sessions. We have a Space onto which we can place different components, like Buttons, ImageViews, Labels.

Using techniques from the Assemble Your Camera playground, we’ve wired up the buttons to perform actions in our own code!

You might have an amazing app right now that looks like a super cool digital aquarium. Or you might have a space-based game with a few tweaks to the images you use.

More tools today

Today we’re going to explore some more tools we can use for our game or app.

Arrays are great tools for keeping track of things in our apps. We’ll look at using them to remember all the fish we add to our app aquarium.

I’ll also show you a really handy feature of Swift Playgrounds for refactoring your code.

See you at 1pm!

We’ll be back again today with our app project in Swift Playgrounds, live at 1pm, Irish time on Twitch!

Yesterday’s session

Yesterday we added a rough hit detection function to tell when we were near another component, which might come in handy if we’re building an app or game where we want to be careful for other objects on the screen.

To do this we looked deep inside the guts of the Swift playground to find the HelperFunctions.swift file, where there was a handy distance(from:) function defined on the Point type. This function did a lot of the hard work of figuring out how far away two points on our grid were from each other.

From there we could figure out if it would look like the images for those components were touching or not.

We also even added a Game Over label for our game, when we did detect a collision.

Today

Today we’ll be going back to the app just one more time, I promise!

We’ll add a counter for our game/app now. This will let us keep track of our score, whatever we determine that to be.

And the last thing we’ll do is add a label to show that score to the player.

See you at 1pm!

Join us today for probably our last session on building an app in Swift Playgrounds! Live on Twitch at 1pm, Irish time!

There’s so much more we could do; we could spend weeks refining our work so far into a game or a full-fledged app.

Today’s Session

Today we’re going to focus on rudimentary hit testing… to see when one component we’ve added to the space is near another one.

We’ll use some functions defined for us inside the guts of the playground, including a method on the Point type called distance(from:). This will return us a Double, which we can use to figure out if two components appear to be touching or not.

This would be an important thing to calculate if we were to make a game where collisions with other objects might be a bad thing (or a good thing, depending on your game).

We’ll also harken back to chapter 10 of Everyone Can Code Puzzles and do some refactoring… we’ve been slapping code together without too much foresight thus far. Now we’ll revise our code a bit and make things that little bit neater.

A major goal of refactoring is often to make life easier for our future self: when we sit back down to go further with our app or game we’ll thank ourself for packaging code into a function or storing something in a variable so we could use it later.

See you at 1pm!