MacDirectory Magazine

Jerad Marantz

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1451520

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Apple’s Swift Playgrounds 4 Now Lets Developers Create Apps Directly from iPad By Jesse Hollington When Apple took the wraps off iPadOS 15 in June, there was one really significant update for the iPad — Swift Playgrounds — that didn’t garner much attention, largely because it wasn’t as much of a user-facing feature as something aimed at aspiring developers. That’s not to say it wasn’t a big deal, however, as it promised to revolutionize how developers create apps for the iPhone and iPad — and now it’s finally arrived. First released five years ago, Swift Playgrounds began its life as an iPad app designed to teach users all the essentials of Swift — a programming language that Apple had introduced two years earlier, in 2014, to provide a much simpler way to code apps for the iPhone and iPad. In its original form, Swift Playgrounds was entirely educational. Users could install it on their iPad to play around with the Swift language, view tutorials on how to code simple projects, and even create mini-app experiences within the app. However, that was pretty much as far as things went. Apple later updated it to add support for programming drones and robots, but again this was done entirely within the Swift Playgrounds app. It was essentially added as another learning experience for aspiring young coders. If you wanted to turn your project into a real iPhone or iPad app, you still needed to move things over to Apple’s full set of Xcode

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