Day 30 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: copy and paste

When you are tired and find yourself copying the code and pasting into Xcode, you know that you are not giving this endeavour your full attention. Must try harder.

Day 29 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: objectionable-c

Background information today, including bridging to old code. Presumably the trend is to deprecate the Objective-C frameworks and replace them with Swift equivalents?

Day 28 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: always sleeping

Today I mostly preferred VStacks and Steppers over Sections and Pickers. But I loved getting rid of a modal dialog box and replacing it with a live value.

Actually, I always like getting rid of modal dialog boxes.

Hello theme edits to date:

• played with colours and the animation
• formatted dates
• swapped the direction of next/previous buttons
• added category labels to each post
• added FontAwesome-powered links

Still to fix:

• year boundary pagination issue
• fix About and add Now pages

It’s taken two years, but: I have finally set up my Micro.blog, have been building up micro-posting habits with routine repetition, have a vague plan to kick start longer form posting, and have even been theme editing. 🚀🌙

Day 27 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: okay dad, whatever

Well, my first experience with building an app that uses machine learning and my Mac is telling me I need to go to bed earlier. Or stop consuming caffeine.

This training data may not be robust, but the potentional here is huge!

Day 26 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: Skynet 1.0 alpha

Not much SwiftUI today. A little bit about dates and calendars. With “hard” warnings. A little bit of machine learning. With “easy” disclaimers. I love living in the future.

Day 25 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: a little quarter given

It’s been a long day, so I didn’t embellish today’s challenge, nor did I tidy up the code with any custom views, etc. Plain and simple wins the race today. 🐢 Job done. 🏁 Maybe make it bling tomorrow? 🤔

Day 24 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: always decomposing

I like the programmatic approach to UI design, but straightforward View decomposition, coupled with custom views/modifiers, is the golden key that unlocks the magic chest of jewels and treasures.

As a new term begins in a brand new decade, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on technology in our classrooms.

I have now worked in my current school for longer that I have been with any single employer; at the start of the 2010s I was Head of Computing. This gave me and pupils in our department privileged access to technology every day; access to tools which encouraged independent problem-solving, access to tools that supported richer content creation and consumption, and access to the ever broadening frontier of information that the Internet was providing. That access enhanced learning.

The rest of the school worked like most schools at the time; a few laptops which could be booked out but rarely were, and even more rarely to good effect, and three and half general purpose computer suites which could also be booked as required. For a school of around 1000 pupils, having about 80 pupil facing, general purpose computing devices was woefully inadequate. But normal in the sector.

There was money spent on tech in schools. Let us not forget the interactive whiteboard investment made in Scottish education over the last 20 years. How can we? No matter how hard we try. The money rarely resulted in tech being in the hands of the pupils.

The Problem

Despite my classroom being a hub of technological potential, the pupils then went home to a mixed selection of toys. There was undoubtedly the occasional home brew Linux proxy server in built in a bedroom to bypass the school filtering system, but that was not typical. The technology, for some classes, was available for as little as 40 minutes a week.

And I was so much better off than the Modern Studies teacher who wanted to carry out an impromptu online activity in the classroom, perhaps in response to breaking news of the day. Filling out a booking form, walking their class across the campus, and then discovering that a quarter of the machines in the computer suite would spend half of the lesson updating to the latest patch of Windows. Did I say “impromptu”?

If only pupils had their own device. In all classes, and at home.

This is old hat now - it’s widespread, although certainly not ubiquitous, for schools to either have or be investing in their own one-to-one deployments. It was a different world nine years ago. It’s also not enough just to throw devices, network connectivity, or money at the problem. There have been many one-to-one device deployments worldwide in the past decade, but what proportion of them have been successful, and by what criteria? The research is still limited in scale and scope.

Perhaps it’s not even the correct problem. But it’s the one I identified.

The Solution

Here’s the thing. The plan is that this is the first in a series of posts I write to capture my own journey through a one-to-one deployment. So the ‘solution’ will build up over time. It will include pitfalls and suggestions, and might then serve as a roadmap for others - or perhaps a series of warning signs.

There are a number of topics I have sketched out to cover, but I am open to questions and suggestions - so get in touch if you want me to cover anything in particular. Details to follow.

The Verdict

So, you might be the kind of person that likes to read the last few pages of a book first. You are keen to know whether the deployment worked? Minimising the number of spoilers…

My school still has three and a half computer suites, but they are almost never used. One-to-one devices are used in eight year groups of the school, from Primary 6 through to the end of secondary, and there is a class sets of devices for use by younger years as well as devices in the nursery. We have repeatedly invested in our infrastructure and software systems as device and network usage has grown.

Personally, I am trusted with a class far less often these days, but I can now more confidently rely on the learning experience being as rich and topical as the combined creativity of myself and my class allows, and I know the potential is more or less uniform for the pupils once the bell rings.

Day 23 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: it’s all in the details

If what you wanted was a great overview of how SwiftUI views and modifiers work, today is the day. Nice and clear.

I wonder how few schools even knew of the existence of SQA Performance Reports?

Perhaps they should be wrapped into a national QA framework for all schools? Rather than being sold as a service.

Exam body service ‘benefits private schools’ - Tes

Day 22 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: neverending story

Rather than have an endless game, I popped a restart button into GuessTheFlag, but it should really have a destructive warning alert of some kind as it currently zeroes the score with a single tap.

The Coming Supremacy of AR - Allen Pike

Leaving aside whether any company can be entrusted to curate our Augmented Reality experience without it being a “hellscape”, I did think the potential of AR could only be unlocked when John Gruber had his previous question addressed:

Why would people who don’t need glasses want to wear thick glasses all day? And they think it will replace phones in a decade? Do we really want our phone display in front of our eyes all day? I just don’t get it.

However, I share Allen Pike’s optimism that the technology will mature to the point of being useful for consumers:

Apple may be optimistic in thinking that the timeline will be only 10 years long, but it seems clear to me that if physics really do make a good AR headset possible – glasses that can usefully and practically render information interleaved with our natural vision – it will change everything.

And his two dozen potential AR features sure sound compelling.

So, the question is not can we build it, or even will they wear it? Rather, what are the minimum set of features the average user will trade a “hellscape” for?

Day 21 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: do you have a flag?

SwiftUI has managed a great balance between simple and powerful with UI declaration across horizontal, vertical, and layered axes - with modifiers allowing fine tuning. I now need to see the same UI on different devices.

Day 20 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: staying alert

When SwiftUI focuses on the design layout it really does a good job. Adding in alerts feels clunky and unnatural in comparison. The tension between layout- and action-oriented code?

Creating content?

Answer the questions people have, in the order they have them, using the language they use, and you will help your search engine rankings, usability and those with visual or cognitive impairments.

Accessibility is usability – Public Digital

Day 19 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: always learning

Who knew the Rankine Scale was a thing? Duly added to my temperature unit converter for this challenge. I left the Delisle, Newton, Réaumur, and Rømer scales for version 2.

Day 18 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: learning new syntax

It’s not immediately obvious why the syntax differs between the following two modifiers:

.keyboardType(.decimalPad)

.pickerStyle(SegmentedPickerStyle())

Yeah, enum vs struct, I am sure it will become clear, but…

Day 17 of #100DaysOfSwiftUI: rapid application development

Xcode 11 and SwiftUI. So much going for them - but autocomplete and the canvas have me looking at my 2014 MBP for the first time and thinking it’s time for an upgrade.