Swift Playgrounds

Code classes come to the Mac

- CARRIE MARSHALL

Free From Apple, apple.com/swift/playgrounds

Needs macOS 10.15.3 or later

It’s taken four years, but Swift Playgrounds has finally made it to the Mac courtesy of Catalyst, Apple’s initiative for bringing iPad apps to macOS. Designed for coding beginners, Swift Playgrounds feels more like a video game than a coding app as it gently teaches you the basic concepts of programming via Apple’s own Swift language, currently in version 5.1.

Swift is used to create apps for Macs, iOS, Apple Watch and Apple TV, but Swift Playgrounds isn’t an app development kit. Think of it as a brightly colored, user– friendly classroom where you’ll learn the concepts you’ll go on to use in Xcode.