
A Closer Look at Swift Playgrounds for iPad - jordansmithnz
http://jordansmith.io/everyone-can-code/
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tsukaisute
A young person in our family was using this. It's a beautiful app, but typing
and editing code on an iPad without a physical keyboard appeared to be
extremely frustrating. Cutting-pasting, refactoring, etc. all become
cumbersome and she had to spend time fighting with the editor instead of
focusing on the problems.

Waiting for them to make a Mac port, since coding happens on a "real" computer
(for now, anyway).

~~~
peteretep
I bought an iPad hoping to teach myself Swift as an experienced developer,
having seen the success my wife had had as a non-programmer.

The UI eventually just irritated me too much, and I sold the iPad. Really wish
this was available as a Mac app.

I am far from the only person for whom learning is only really possible while
doing, and I'd _love_ to see more programming language tutorials written as
problems to solve, but targetted at experienced developers. I can kind of fake
it by solving the Cryptopals problem set for a language, but I'd like
something where the initial learning curve jump was minimized.

This particular degree course
([http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/](http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/)) is the
only reason I have a degree, as almost all the modules were _doing_ rather
than _listening_ or _reading_.

~~~
Grustaf
Ifyou have a mac, just use xcode and the stanford course, that's what almost
every ios developer inknow did...

~~~
peteretep
They seem to have a couple, which are you recommending?

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Grustaf
As far as I know they are all the same course, just new editions for each
batch of students (and by coincidence, each new iOS versiopn).

I followed it when it was still objective c, and I can only assume it gets
better each time. As long as it's still the excellent Paul Hegarthy holding
it, just use the latest one.

If you use the Itunes U app on the ipad you'll get all the exercises etc in a
nice format. And at least when I did it there was even a special forum for all
the MOOC students to discuss the lectures and exercises.

I can't recommend this course enough, it's one of the best I've ever come
across, any category.

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DigitalJack
Interesting. I've mostly been programming clojure for the last couple years.
But I've got one project I'd like to try to make that is very GUI centric.

I don't know what it is about GUI programming, but I pretty much hate it. It's
a complete schlep for me... it seems to take so much energy and work for
something that is tangential.

If I had to go through the same level of effort to print something to the
console, I'd never program anything.

~~~
nsxwolf
Add me to that club. Every tool designed to make GUI programming easier seems
to just add complexity and confusion.

From hand coded Win32 C++ GUIs to Tcl to Swing to Interface
Builder/Storyboards, AngularJS and Bootstrap, I've had to use it all and have
managed to turn all those things into giant writhing masses of spaghetti code
every time.

~~~
bsaul
that's because , as much as we backend dev don't like to admit, frontend
development is actually quite hard to be done properly. You have pretty much
the same issues as in the backend : state management, concurrency, latency;
plus specific ones : aesthetic and ergonomic.

i've seen many backend dev calling themselves code heroes falling apart after
a few days spent trying to design an android interface. it's a great humility
lesson.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
> state management

Every GUI of any significant complexity I've ever created ended up needing (if
not _having_ ) an explicit state machine to work reliably.

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Grustaf
The on screen ipad keyboard does support moving the cursor, just put two
fingers on the keyboard and move them around.

With an external keyboard selection works like on a pc, just hold shift and
use the arrow keys.

The only thing that's really missing to make editing text on the ipad a breeze
is a way to select while moving the cursor with the two finger gesture above.

~~~
jads
>The only thing that's really missing to make editing text on the ipad a
breeze is a way to select while moving the cursor with the two finger gesture
above.

You can. Double-tap a word or character so it's selected, _then_ do the two-
finger select gesture on the keyboard.

~~~
interpol_p
You can go one better than that: double tap with two fingers _on the software
keyboard_ to initiate a selection on the current word and then drag to extend
selection.

You don't need to double tap on the actual text or characters, you just tap-
then-drag with two fingers on the software keyboard.

~~~
Grustaf
Amazing, thanks! I tried various versions of single finger tapping but the
result is usually both disastrous and expected, replacing the selection with a
single letter.

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wjakob
I wish Apple would internationalize this program to make it accessible to
children in non-English-speaking countries.

~~~
microtherion
That has already happened to some extent, and presumably is going to happen
further: [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/03/swift-playgrounds-
now...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/03/swift-playgrounds-now-
available-in-five-additional-languages/)

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fgandiya
One thing I wished this app had was a playground that teaches you how to
interact with the iOS SDK. After all, you can use it in the blank playground,
might as well show people how to use it.

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wingerlang
Too bad it isn't available for iOS 9.

~~~
jclardy
For what? iPad 2?

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wingerlang
iPad Air.

