CS193p

I’ve loved the first couple of these “Getting Started with SwiftUI” lectures from Paul Hegarty at Stanford. He’s put a lot of thought into the sequence, and seems to address the questions that float up in my mind (with super clear explanations) just as I’m thinking of them. They also generously make the reading and homework assignments available at cs193p.sites.stanford.edu so it’s possible to treat it as a course which I have made a bit of a start on, before being distracted by building my own simple app.

Playgrounds

One of the threads that’s led me to learning iOS development is last year’s release of the Swift Playgrounds 4 app. I’ve long had a hankering for a tool to create IOS apps, and a few years ago invested a bit of time in Codea .

Playgrounds possibly started as a little live scratchpad for code in Xcode, but now it’s big news in STEM education for getting kids started on coding. It’s possible to create (and share) Playground “books” that lead users through steps in programming. Playgrounds is supplied with one that covers the beginnings of programing - functions, loops, conditions etc and many more are downloadable. This is actually one of the methods I’m using for picking up Swift basics - I can pick it up in any spare five minutes and solve a puzzle to progress my learning.

App Idea

Here’s a rough plan for a “hello world” that’s simple enough to be achieved in the short term, but hopefully not too trivial to be accepted into the app store.

This is sketched out on GoodNotes 5. I started with the Apple Notes app, but was frustrated by not being able to mix text and drawing. Noteabilty looked great, but the once off purchase for GoodNotes was easier to swallow.