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Comment by tsukaisute | Hacker News Reader

A young person in our family was using this. It's a beautiful app, but typing and editing code on an iPad without a physical keyboard appeared to be extremely frustrating. Cutting-pasting, refactoring, etc. all become cumbersome and she had to spend time fighting with the editor instead of focusing on the problems.

Waiting for them to make a Mac port, since coding happens on a "real" computer (for now, anyway).

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I bought an iPad hoping to teach myself Swift as an experienced developer, having seen the success my wife had had as a non-programmer.

The UI eventually just irritated me too much, and I sold the iPad. Really wish this was available as a Mac app.

I am far from the only person for whom learning is only really possible while doing, and I'd love to see more programming language tutorials written as problems to solve, but targetted at experienced developers. I can kind of fake it by solving the Cryptopals problem set for a language, but I'd like something where the initial learning curve jump was minimized.

This particular degree course (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/) is the only reason I have a degree, as almost all the modules were doing rather than listening or reading.

Ifyou have a mac, just use xcode and the stanford course, that's what almost every ios developer inknow did...

They seem to have a couple, which are you recommending?

Developing iOS 10 Apps with Swift. iTunes U recordings are from Winter 2016/2017 and are using Swift 3 so it's pretty up to date.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-10-apps-wi...

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

Swift 4 and iOS 11 are coming soon, but I wouldn't wait for the course to get updated. Downside of it being a university lecture is that it'll be a while.

As far as I know they are all the same course, just new editions for each batch of students (and by coincidence, each new iOS versiopn).

I followed it when it was still objective c, and I can only assume it gets better each time. As long as it's still the excellent Paul Hegarthy holding it, just use the latest one.

If you use the Itunes U app on the ipad you'll get all the exercises etc in a nice format. And at least when I did it there was even a special forum for all the MOOC students to discuss the lectures and exercises.

I can't recommend this course enough, it's one of the best I've ever come across, any category.

You can use a bluetooth keyboard with an ipad. (the stock aluminium mac keyboard is the most obvious choice but I guess every bluetooth keyboard will work).

Even cheap keyboard cases provide an incredible productivity boost. Was amazed that shortcut keys like cmd-tab just work.

Interestingly even emacs-style shortcut keys for text navigation have been supported in iOS text fields since forever when using a bluetooth keyboard.

I like to work out small examples on the iPad. It’s not ready to replace Xcode but you can certainly work out small examples. At some point I’ll move my code to Xcode to continue.

By the way, I’ve created a Github repo with two dozens basic examples that should help anyone who likes to learn from code:

https://github.com/melling/ios_topics/blob/master/README.md

It all compiles in Swift 4 without warnings on Xcode 9.

I have a feeling we are going to see a bigger push for development work on the iPad this upcoming year. Xcode 9 took a huge chunk from the iPad Swift Playgrounds app (mainly the new source editor.)

Being able to edit storyboards and wire up view connections on my iPad would be awesome.

Integrating this app into Playgrounds in xcode would work, although they'd have to make it accessible; xcode is easy enough to install, but it's not marketed as a "install this to learn to code" type of app. Distributing it separately would be better.

The playground format that this course uses ("playground book") is currently not supported in xcode, but hopefully that will change at some point.

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