When Apple announced Swift back in the summer of ’14 they also made quite the fuss about Xcode’s new playground feature. This was going to be a live coding environment where you could work through simple expressions and functions and see the results in real-time. It was charming, and you could see this being a great tool for beginners, but I had a hard time seeing how a developer working on a project would gain much value from it.

Fast forward a year and a half later and now I get it. Today I find myself using playgrounds in my projects, not just for testing out quick little code blocks, but for organizing and keeping a detailed reference of code and other assets relevant to the project. It can actually be a valuable tool for managing your work and being more efficient!

Because playgrounds don’t get much attention I wanted to put together a quick post that highlighted as many of the best resources that I could find to help beginners, and people of all levels for that matter, get an idea of what playgrounds can do. I end the article with some examples of how I have starting using playgrounds in my own workflow, hopefully sparking some people to think about how playgrounds could work for them. It is not a big time investment so this is an ideal subject for a quiet weekend, or over the course of a few evenings. Read More