Everyone wants to make their own app but it's quite a daunting experience to get started, and one that requires commitment. Apple is trying to solve the first half of this equation with Swift Playgrounds - an app that’s targeted towards someone completely new to developing apps by making it more fun than work.
As the name suggests, Swift Playgrounds helps you make apps in Swift language. Now on v4.1, one of its major improvements is that it now allows you to create apps for the Mac as well. With the previous version, you were only able to make apps for iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad.
Getting started with Swift Playgrounds is as easy as launching the app and picking a ready-made project from the App Gallery. You can also start from scratch but that's not something we’d recommended for someone learning how to code. There are plenty of examples such as an “About Me” app or a “Date Planner” app that one can start with and customize to get a feel of how things work before creating an app of your own.
On the Mac, the layout of the app is quite simple with three panes. The left pane shows you all your assets and files while the center pane shows you your code. The rightmost pane has a real-time preview letting you see changes you make to your coding on the fly.
Besides the example apps, there are plenty of tutorials to help you learn and they’re categorized as Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced to take your skills to the next level.
We spoke to Matt Moss, the developer of the popular iOS widget Locket that showcases photos from your contacts on your home screen and he mentioned that it only took a couple of weeks to develop Locket, which is quite impressive.
We also spoke to Sabrina Sales, a 13 year old developer based out of UAE and a participant in this year’s Swift Student Challenge. Her submission to the challenge is a game called Procrastigator, which is about an alligator struggling with procrastination. Each level of the game teaches the player about procrastination and how to combat it.
It took Sabrina just over a month to complete Procrastigaor, and while she used XCode on her Mac to develop it, she tested it out on an iPad using Swift Playgrounds. The ability to switch between Swift Playgrounds and XCode makes it easy for a developer to move projects between Apple’s tools aimed towards beginners or advanced coders.
In fact, Apple’s entire ecosystem - software and hardware - makes it very easy for anyone to use the right tool for the right job at hand. Sabrina used Procreate on her iPad to design the visuals for Procrastigaor which she moved to her Mac and used XCode to work on the actual app.
Swift PlayGrounds and XCode are both available for free, however you need an Apple device to use either of them and it only lets you create apps for the Apple ecosystem.
