My students (like many or most people) love the memes they find on the web and every year at the end of the Develop In Swift Explorations course when I tell them that we are going to make a meme making app they get VERY excited! We work through the MemeMaker project (the project can be found in Unit 4 starting on page 384 in the Develop in Swift Explorations Student book and starting on page 589 in the Teacher Guide), the students enjoy the lesson and making the project, and then inevitably, every year they say, "What else can we do with?" They also say, "Why can't I do anything with my picture?" and "I wish I could do something with the picture." and "How can I use my picture?" I have gotten these questions and comments for three years. So, for my current junior (11th grade in the US) class I wanted to have something ready for them when they asked those questions. So, during quarantine I set out to work on a project to take the current MemeMaker project and add three pieces of functionality to it:
1. The ability to import pictures from the user's Photo Library
2. The ability to save the current meme to Photos.
3. The ability to share the current meme via the system Share Sheet.
The general purpose of this project is to review and give my students extra practice writing code that uses Optionals, creating segues, making multiple-screen apps, and introduce some simple Apple frameworks such as SafariServices and PDFKit. Additionally, this project provides me another chance to teach my students to the process of software improvement and iteration by taking some software they created and adding functionality to it. In doing this I am also able to introduce the concepts of software versioning and using GitHub for software creation, versioning, and the proper (and safe) way to iterate on software using branching and merging. If you are going to do this project individually or with your students, I am going to make the assumption that you have access to Mac hardware and, just as important, Apple first-party software such as Keynote, Preview, and Pages.
One of the few positive unintended consequences of the pandemic and resulting change to my district's school schedule is that got more time with my students. This has resulted in my students learning more lessons and building more apps this year than I have been able to accomplish in previous years (this is the fifth year I have taught some sort of app development using Swift). My junior (11th grade) students and I worked through the entire Develop in Swift Explorations course . This class LOVES to make and play games - that is actually a big part of our Career-Tech program.. So, the RPS (Rock Paper Scissors) app was on their favorite lessons we had all year. Given their enthusiasm with making this app I wanted to seize upon this opportunity to extend this app in order to teach my students version control, the software development/iteration process.
I was, like many iOS developers, shocked last week when SwiftUI was announced at WWDC 2019).
I have always wanted to live in a Jetson's style home of the future filled with robots, assistants, and other tech that would allow me to yell out commands and have something happen, such as unlocking my doors, controlling the lights, or even setting the termperature.
There is much great educational content on YouTube. There are great TED Talks and "How-to" videos that our staff use in their classrooms as supplements to their lessons. Our students...
[TextExpander](https://textexpander.com) is a very helpful Mac that saves me time on my Mac every time I use my Mac. There are 4 things, as I see it, that TextExpander does and does very well on a Mac: However, I spend as much or more time working on my iPads than I do on my Macs.