Posts tagged with "Swift"

Apple Announces Swift Student Challenge Timeline for 2025→

Apple has announced that the 2025 Swift Student Challenge will be held for three weeks in February 2025. According to Apple’s press release:

Students, educators, and their advocates can find out how to prepare for the challenge and sign up to be notified when applications open at developer.apple.com. Apple will recognize a total of 350 Swift Student Challenge winners whose submissions demonstrate excellence in innovation, creativity, social impact, or inclusivity. From this esteemed group, 50 Distinguished Winners will receive additional recognition and be invited to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino next summer.

The company has also updated its Swift Coding Club, a website with resources for students preparing for the annual Challenge, and added new Develop in Swift Tutorials.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about the Swift Student Challenge in February when it kicks off and then again closer to WWDC as we did this year. I’m glad Apple has extended the timeline for publicizing the Swift Student Challenge, which I’m sure will give students and educators more time to prepare for the event and submit their best work.

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A Look at Code Completion and Swift Assist Coming in Xcode 16

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Earlier today, I got the very first live demo of Swift Assist, one of the many developer tools introduced today by Apple. I also saw code completion in action. It was an impressive demo, and although the tools seem like magic and will undoubtedly be valuable to developers, they do have their limitations, which are worth exploring.

Code Completion in Action. Source: Apple.Replay

First, from what I could tell, code completion works extremely well. The demo I saw was of a simple restaurant app that displayed a menu. As an Apple representative typed variables and other items into Xcode, code completion named things in ways that made sense for a restaurant menu, such as Name, Price, and Calories. The feature also filled in types like strings, integers, and bools, along with the appropriate surrounding syntax.

In most cases, after typing just a handful of characters, the correct suggestion appeared and with a quick tap of the Tab key, the rest of the line of code was filled in. When the suggestion wasn’t what was wanted, a little additional typing steered the AI that backs code completion to the correct solution.

The model that drives code completion is trained specifically for the Swift programming language and Apple’s APIs. It runs locally on a developer’s Mac, enhancing privacy and ensuring that it’s available regardless of Internet connectivity. Although Apple was vague about the code on which the model was trained, it was clear from my briefing that it wasn’t on Apple’s own internal code, but Apple said it is code that it is authorized to use. I was also told that the model isn’t trained on the code of the developers that use the feature. Also worth noting is that Apple’s code completion model is continually updated independent of the update release cycle of Xcode itself.

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Apple Introduces Three of the Distinguished Swift Student Challenge Winners

Earlier this week, Federico and I interviewed two of the Swift Student Challenge winners on AppStories, which was a lot of fun. A new feature of the 2024 competition was the addition of Distinguished Winners. As Apple explains it in a press release published today:

Out of 350 winning submissions, 50 students have been named Distinguished Winners for building app playgrounds that stand out for their innovation, creativity, social impact, or inclusivity. These 50 students have been invited to a three-day in-person experience at Apple Park that includes tailored programming and the special event at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where they’ll join like-minded creators from all over the world.

Apple’s press release includes profiles of three of the Distinguished Winners: Elena Galluzzo, a college student from Canada, Dezmond Blair, from Canton, Michigan, and Jawaher Shaman, who is studying at the Apple Developer Academy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Elena Galluzzo’s winning app is an assistant for seniors:

Galluzzo designed Care Capsule to be an all-in-one assistant for elderly people. She used Apple’s machine learning framework Create ML to build a chatbot that analyzes interactions with the user to deduce whether they are experiencing loneliness or depression. The app also lets users track their medications, connect with community resources, and keep a record of positive memories.

Dezmond Blair, who attended the Apple Developer Academy in Detroit, built MTB XTREME, an app that

…puts users behind the handlebars of a mountain bike, offering a 360-degree view of the trails around them.”

Finally, Jawaher Shaman created an app called My Child to help people with speech conditions:

My Child tells Shaman’s story through the eyes of a child who stutters, and features characters inspired by her father and grandfather. The app guides users through exercises that help slow down their breathing and prepare them for real-life experiences like reading a story in class. Shaman used AVFAudio to add sounds that mimic the way her father would break sentences into small, more manageable parts.

Every year, I’m impressed with the projects students come up with for the Swift Student Challenge, and this year is no exception. Harshitha Rajesh and Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg, whom Federico and I spoke to Monday, as well as the Distinguished Swift Student Challenge winners whose projects Apple featured today, are great examples of the sort of impactful projects that students from 35 countries and regions have created for the Challenge. It’s great to hear that 50 of the students will be at WWDC this year. Hopefully, Federico and I will have the chance to meet a few of them.

Building Games for Playdate in Swift→

Panic’s Playdate has been in the news again recently. The company has caught up with pre-orders, so anyone can order one, and it will ship within 2-3 days. Also, Lucas Pope, the creator of beloved games like Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn just released Mars After Midnight, a game I plan to dig into this weekend. The Playdate catalog is also running its first-ever sale, but there’s just one day left, so check it out today.

Most recently, I saw Panic’s Cabel Sasser link on Threads to a post by Rauhul Varma on the Swift.org blog. The Playdate’s developer SDK supports Lua and C, and as Varma explains, “the typical Swift application and runtime exceed the device’s tight resource constraints.”

However, Varma, who is an engineer in Apple’s Advanced Prototyping in the Platform Architecture group, had an idea for building Playdate games that would fit on the device:

Recently, the Swift project began developing a new embedded language mode to support highly constrained platforms. This mode utilizes generic specialization, inlining, and dead code stripping to produce tiny binaries, while retaining the core features of Swift…

These defining characteristics make the embedded language mode a great solution for shrinking Swift to fit the Playdate’s constraints.

To demonstrate the approach, Varma shares two games built in Swift: Conway’s Game of Life, which is a sample included in the Playdate SDK, and a Breakout-like game called Swift-Break. For developers who are interested in building games for the Playdate using Swift, Varma’s post includes a detailed explanation of the process, and the code and documentation are available on GitHub.

I love this project because it lowers the barrier to getting started for Swift developers who may not be as comfortable or familiar with Lua or C. I hope this leads to even more great releases for Panic’s awesome little handheld game platform.

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Apple Opens the 2024 Swift Student Challenge to Submissions→

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Apple has opened up submissions for the 2024 Swift Student Challenge. As we reported last November, the format of this year’s format is a little different than in the past. Eligible students have from today through February 25, 2024, to submit their app playgrounds on a topic of their choosing.

Apple will choose 350 winners from the entries submitted and name 50 of those Distinguished Winners who will be invited by Apple to visit its Cupertino headquarters. All winners will receive a one-year membership in the Apple Developer Program, a voucher to take an App Development with Swift certification exam, and a special gift.

Two of my kids participated in the Swift Student Challenge in the past. If you know a student who’s interested in learning to code, I know from experience that this is a great way to get them started and excited about the subject.

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Apple Announces the Swift Student Challenge Will Begin in February 2024 and New Everyone Can Code Resources

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

It’s hard to believe that it has been over nine years since Apple announced the Swift programming language at WWDC. From the day it debuted, one of the pillars of Swift has been Apple’s education efforts, which have included Swift Playgrounds, materials for teachers and students, events, coding centers, and of course, the annual Swift Student Challenge at WWDC. So, with Swift’s 10th anniversary around the corner, it’s not surprising that Apple is updating its Swift Student Challenge program and releasing new resources for educators.

Today, the company announced that the next Swift Student Challenge will begin in February 2024, a break from the past WWDC schedule. The competition will name 350 winners in total, 50 of whom will be named Distinguished Winners whose projects stand out from the other submissions. Distinguished Winners will be invited to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino in the summer to meet with Apple engineers and other winners, and all winners will receive a one-year membership to the Apple Developer Program.

The Swift Student Challenge will run for three weeks in February 2024, and students can sign up to be notified of when the competition will begin here.

Apple is also expanding its Everyone Can Code program with four new projects providing additional resources for students to learn to build apps. The projects, which provide educators with resources to guide students, include the following:

  • Design a Simple App: Students can create an app prototype in Keynote to learn the fundamentals of app design, practice rapid prototyping, and collect feedback, following the same steps as professional developers. 
  • Build with Stacks and Shapes: Students can take the first steps of building an app in Swift Playgrounds and code a self-portrait or a work of art using SwiftUI to learn the fundamentals of user interface design.
  • Build Custom Shapes: Students can bring an app interface to the next level by designing a shape, learning how to plot the coordinates, and coding their custom shape using SwiftUI and the About Me sample app within Swift Playgrounds.
  • Design an App Icon: Students can learn and apply app design principles to create a unique and memorable app icon that communicates an idea; practice rapid prototyping; collect feedback; and upload the icon to Swift Playgrounds to become part of an app.

The projects can be accessed by educators from the Apple Education Community website.

The expansion of the Swift Student Challenge and other announcements today are great to see. It’s a fantastic way to get students excited about coding, as we’ve seen first-hand based on the growing number of apps we write about at MacStories that were built by former Challenge participants. I’m looking forward to seeing what students come up with this year.

Apple to Offer a New Coding Lab for Kids Beginning Next Week

Next week, Apple is introducing a new Today at Apple session for kids who are interested in learning to code: Coding Lab for Kids: Code Your First App. Starting December 5th, the session will walk children 10 and up through building an app with Swift Playgrounds.

According to Apple’s press release:

During the lab, Apple Creative Pros will lead aspiring coders and their guardians in an interactive activity using iPad and Swift Playgrounds…. Working in the About Me playground, participants will use SwiftUI and a new, real-time app preview to customize and bring their app to life with fun fonts, background colors, Memoji, and more.

After its debut, Coding Lab for Kids: Code Your First App will become a regular part of the Today at Apple programming.

As a parent, I’m always glad to see sessions like this added to Today at Apple. The company offers a lot of interesting programs, but having helped my kids find resources to learn to code when they were younger was difficult. Introductory sessions like the one announced today and Apple’s other resources for parents and educators have come a long way in recent years and now enable a wide spectrum of kids who are interested in coding to find the materials to help them get started.

If you want to sign a kid up, you can look for a nearby Apple Store offering the session here.

Swift Playgrounds 4.0: First Look

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Yesterday, Apple released Swift Playgrounds 4.0, the first version of the app from which you can build an app and publish it on the App Store. That’s a big step forward for the app that started as a limited sandbox for learning to code. The app is not as capable as Xcode. Still, with support for Swift 5.5, live previewing of the app you’re building as you code, multiwindowing, access to SwiftUI, UIKit, the ability to move projects between Swift Playgrounds and Xcode, and more, the app has an enormous amount of potential waiting to be tapped.

Apple's coding course selection has grown steadily since 2016.

Apple’s coding course selection has grown steadily since 2016.

Swift Playgrounds has steadily improved since its introduction in 2016 on the iPad and launch on the Mac last year. Early versions of the app were firmly grounded in learning to code. That’s still the case. The app includes an extensive catalog of lessons on how to code and build apps. There’s also a new ‘Get Started with Apps’ lesson and an App Gallery section that includes several sample apps to help teach coding basics.

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MacStories Developer Debrief: WWDC 2021

We kicked off the MacStories Summer OS Preview Series on AppStories a couple of weeks ago with interviews of four 2021 Apple Design Award winners. We’ll also publish a series of in-depth first-looks at what users can expect this fall from iOS and iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. We’ll also be interviewing developers on AppStories, exploring the technical details that we expect will have the biggest impact on upcoming app updates and releases. You can follow along with the series through our dedicated hub or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Today, we wanted to continue the conversations that began with the AppStories ADA interviews by talking to seven more developers about a wide range of topics. Now that the initial excitement has passed and the dust settled from WWDC, we wanted to hear more from the developers who will be using Apple’s latest technologies to bring readers new apps and innovative updates to readers this fall.

This year, we spoke to:

The following is a collection of the responses from each of the developers I interviewed on a wide range of topics from new frameworks and APIs to Shortcuts on the Mac, the ability to publish apps built on the iPad, SharePlay, SwiftUI, Swift concurrency, and more. Thanks so much to everyone for sharing their insights on these topics with MacStories readers. We greatly appreciate everyone taking time out of their busy post-WWDC schedules to participate.

I received fantastic, thoughtful responses from all of the developers I interviewed, which resulted in more material than I could use for this story. However, we’ll be featuring unabridged versions of the interviews in the next two issues of MacStories Weekly. It’s an excellent way to get an even deeper sense of the ramifications of this year’s WWDC announcements. If you’re not already a member, you can learn more at club.macstories.net or sign up below.

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