After announcing the new ‘Swift Playgrounds 4’ version of its coding app at the WWDC 21 event, Apple has now invited developers to test the beta version of the app, ahead of its launch. Although participating developers signed a non-disclosure agreement with Apple, a source leaked images of the Swift Playgrounds 4 in beta with 9to5Mac revealing the app’s design and features.
The upcoming app is an updated version of the already available Swift Playgrounds app on iPad and Mac. As an educational tool, the app makes it interactive and fun to learn Swift for everyone, even those with no prior knowledge or experience of coding. The new Swift Playgrounds 4 will make this learning experience more convenient by allowing users to create visual designs, open and edit apps in Swift Playgrounds and build and submit real apps to the App Store directly from their iPads.
New Swift Playgrounds 4 beta allows users to directly submit apps to the App Store without building an Xcode app on Mac
The upcoming Swift learning app expands the productivity of an iPad. As discovered in the beta testing of Swift Playgrounds 4, users can directly submit their apps to the App Store Connect without building the app via Xcode on Mac. Users can create personalized icons by selecting a color and symbol. They can also choose an icon from an image file and the app automatically adjusts it to the right resolution.
Users are able to test the app in full screen, search across files, explore Swift UI, easily switch between Swift Playgrounds and Xcode, and utilize quick inline code suggestions. Furthermore, Swift Playgrounds 4 allows users to preview and make changes in real-time and the live editing feature works even when the project is shared with others via iCloud Drive which makes collaboration easy and quick.
As per the source, a few features of the new app required the iPadOS 15.2 version. Thus, it can be assumed that the app will launch in the upcoming iPadOS 15.2 update later this year or early 2022. Apple’s Sebastien Marineau-Mes, VP Intelligent System Experience described the new Swift Playground 4 app as;
“ Think one of the big insights here was that we also saw a number of kind of pro developers using it as a prototyping platform, and a way to be able to be on the bus, or in the park, or wherever if you wanted to get in and give something a try, this was super accessible and easy way to get there and could be a nice adjunct to hey, I want to learn to code.” -Borchers
“If you’re a developer, it’s actually more productive to be able to run that app on the device that you’re working on because you really get great fidelity. And with the open project format, you can go back and forth between Xcode and Playgrounds. So, as Bob said, we can really envision people using this for a lot of rapid prototyping on the go without having to bring along the rest of their development environment so we think it’s a really, really powerful addition to our development tools this year.” – Marineau-Mes
