How to use SwiftUI in Swift Playgrounds
Get started with SwiftUI right on your iPad
Apple just updated its Swift Playgrounds iPad app with support for Swift 5.1, dark mode, and SwiftUI, which means it’s now possible to try building SwiftUI apps and components entirely on your iPad.
Although Swift Playgrounds comes with a handful of templates for various kinds of projects, none of them are for SwiftUI – at least not yet. Hopefully that will change in the near future, not least because we’re approaching Code Week here in the EU – it would be great to see Apple taking Everyone Can Code to the next level with something based around SwiftUI.
In the meantime, if you want to get started you can create a new Blank Playground then add your code there. It takes a little boilerplate, so to save you some time here’s the code you need to get started:
import SwiftUI
import PlaygroundSupport
struct ContentView: View {
var body: some View {
Text("Hello World")
}
}
PlaygroundPage.current.setLiveView(ContentView())At this time support for SwiftUI isn’t ideal: NavigationView doesn’t work well because it tries to run as a split view controller, and there is no support for the instant preview canvas that we get with Xcode – you need to keep tapping “Run My Code”.
Still, it’s a massive leap forward, and is only going to improve. And don’t forget that even without SwiftUI you still get all the benefits of iOS 13, including the new Swift 5.1 opaque return types, Combine, and more.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use SwiftUI to build apps, you should read my free online book: SwiftUI by Example. You might also want to try my 100 Days of SwiftUI course, which teaches you SwiftUI as you build real apps.
SAVE 20% ON iOS CONF SG The largest iOS conference in Southeast Asia is back in Singapore for the 5th time in January 2020, now with two days of workshops plus two days of talks on SwiftUI, Combine, GraphQL, and more! Save a massive 20% on your tickets by clicking on this link.
About the author
Paul Hudson is the creator of Hacking with Swift, the most comprehensive series of Swift books in the world. He's also the editor of Swift Developer News, the maintainer of the Swift Knowledge Base, and a speaker at Swift events around the world. If you're curious you can learn more here.
