iOS 11 is around the corner and it looks like Apple is planning some pretty meaty changes along with it.
Over at WWDC, the company announced the following changes to the mobile operating system, which will also include an augmented reality kit as well as CoreML, which gives developers access to on-device machine learning capabilities.
Apple offered the following list of forthcoming changes:
Ladies and gents, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off today in San Jose on Monday.
The keynote will begin on Monday at 2 PM PST and we’ll provide full coverage of the highly-anticipated announcements as they become available.
Stick around, the news shall be forthcoming and you can catch the livestream here from the moment it begins.
This could lead to something pretty neat.
Apple released an update on Thursday in which it provided a detailed update as to Swift Playgrounds 1.5 will let students control robots, drone, and musical instruments.
The announcement reads as follows:
Apple® today announced that Swift Playgrounds™, its educational coding app for iPad®, will offer an exciting new way to learn to code using robots, drones and musical instruments. Swift Playgrounds is perfect for students and beginners learning to code with Swift™, Apple’s powerful and intuitive programming language for building world-class apps.
Apple says Swift Playgrounds 1.5 will let students control Bluetooth-connected bots including “LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3, Sphero SPRK+, Parrot drones and more.”
In the announcement, Craig Federighi says Swift Playgrounds already has over 1 million users around the world. Apple specifically details compatibility between Swift Playgrounds 1.5 and these products:
— LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 are incredibly popular in schools around the world and give students the power to explore coding through real-life problem solving as they create and command their own robotic LEGO creatures, vehicles, machines and inventions. With Swift Playgrounds kids can code and interact with their creations’ motors and sensors.
— Sphero SPRK+, a popular robotic ball, rolls, turns, accelerates and changes colors. Sensors provide feedback when Sphero hits an obstacle, and all of it can be controlled with Swift code.
— Parrot’s Mambo, Airborne and Rolling Spider drones can take off, land, turn and perform aerial figures like flips, all under the control of code users create.
— UBTECH’s Jimu Robot MeeBot Kit lets kids program their buildable robot to walk, wave and dance.
— Dash by Wonder Workshop is an exciting, hands-on learning robot for students, designed to teach the fundamentals of coding, creative problem solving and computational thinking.
— Skoog is a tactile cube that enables children of all abilities to have fun exploring, creating and playing music with Swift code.
Cool stuff, albeit this begs the question: Where was anything this nifty when I was a kid?
Apple says the new version of Swift Playgrounds will be available starting Monday, June 5. Swift Playgrounds is available for free for the iPad and requires iOS 10.0 or later to install and run.
Apple won’t be televising its WWDC, albeit you can live-stream it to your heart’s content.
The company has confirmed that users will be able to live-stream the keynote for the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple’s first event of the year is scheduled to kick off with a keynote on Monday, June 5 at 10 a.m. PT.
The Worldwide Developers Conference will take place from June 5th to the 9th at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. Apple will also be uploading videos of several conference sessions so you can watch them online.
If you or anyone you know is looking to get into Swift coding, this might be your thing.
Apple has just launched a new app development curriculum, available on the company’s iBooks e-reader app, that aims to let anyone in high school or community college learn to code in Swift and create apps for iPhone and iPad.
In 2016, Apple launched Swift Playgrounds at its WWDC event. The project’s goal was to get children of all ages to become familiar with the basic concepts of code. This represents the next step and several community colleges have simultaneously announced support for the new curriculum, including the Alabama Community College System, Columbus State Community College, Harrisburg Area Community College, Houston Community College, Mesa Community College, and San Mateo Community College District, with more colleges and high schools on the way.