Apple’s magnificent London headquarters at the former Battersea Power Station was host this week to a special event which unveiled the latest Swift Student Challenge, which encourages students to submit their apps (it starts in February).
Now, though, it’s just days to go until European Code Week, and in Battersea two eloquent, persuasive developers demoed their latest achievements, and Esther Hare, Apple’s Senior Director of Worldwide Developer Marketing told me how important the Swift Student Challenge is to the company.
One of the reasons it’s so popular is that Apple recognizes 350 winners for their success, 50 of whom, described as Distinguished Winners, will be invited to visit Cupertino next summer.
“We want people creating,” Hare explains, “and so we need these kids really thinking through how they’re going to solve problems and a lot of what they’re solving is what they’re seeing. So, seeing what local problems are in their community can create a spark where they think they could do something that could actually make a difference.”
The first developer is Aiden Forrest, a 17-year-old from Newcastle upon Tyne. He’s young, but even so, this isn’t his first app that he’s demonstrating. It’s called Heartbeat Hero and was created as what turned out to be a winning entry in the Swift Student Challenge. It teaches an interactive method of learning to perform CPR on adults or on children. Forrest was inspired by his firefighter uncle who described to Aiden how he saved someone’s life by performing CPR on them until an ambulance could arrive.
“For me, iOS development was always the end goal, because the ability to interact with the device and the hardware is unparalleled for using things like Swift. For my app, I needed access to the camera and to the microphone using things like ARKit, which is something Swift, just allows you to easily drag into the app.”
It’s imaginatively done. The camera is used so that when you’re trying out the movement needed for CPR for yourself, the camera looks at the ceiling and works with the accelerometer to see how hard you’re pressing.
It also uses Apple Maps and a database to guide users to the location of the nearest defibrillator, for instance.
Swift works a little like having a senior engineer looking over your shoulder to help you understand the code you’re working on.
Esther Hare thinks the kind of heartfelt and personal aspect found by Forrest is a key part of success in app development. “When we look at the Swift Student Challenge applications, one of the things that we see over and over again is it’s values-driven in terms of where they get the ideas from. The first line of code is easy: it requires commitment to stick with it, and so typically those kids who have a real passion over it, are the kids that we see that are doing really well.”
The second app, called Lungy, comes from a doctor. Luke Hale works in the British National Health Service. During the Covid lockdown in the U.K. in 2020. When Covid patients were being weaned off ventilators they were given a sheet of exercises and a plastic box to encourage them to breathe more deeply. Hale noticed that the boxes were unused and patients were focusing on something else: their phones.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the exercises could be on their phones and respond to breathing in some way, to make them interactive and fun? I imagined they would breathe out with amazing visuals which would evolve and transform on the screen. and this would incentivize them to do breathing exercises and strengthen their breathing muscles. There was just one problem: I’d never made an app before or had any idea how to make one. I downloaded Xcode, so I could make a prototype on my iPhone. At first it was like learning a new language but over time, I could do basic things, like some very simple animations. And it started being a lot more fun.”
The finished app does indeed have immersive and attractive visuals that pulse and change as you breathe, with the app encouraging if you’re not breathing into it right.
Hale goes on, “I think I didn’t appreciate how difficult some of the steps would be, especially the kind of regulatory stuff that you have to do with something medical like this, but you just take each step and eventually you get there.”
Hare says, “Dr. Luke was saying how the app became his world during Covid. He saw how he could create something that could make a difference. I think that’s what’s incredible about the tools that we provide. We create the frameworks and the APIs but we don’t really know what people are going to do with them until they take them and change them into something.”
Apple intelligence arrives on the iPhone soon. How much is something like Apple Intelligence going to change the nature of coding, I wonder? “Our goal is that people will use the phenomenal tools coming for coding that we’ve announced. It will make things easier but it’s not cheating, you’ve got to understand how they work and you’ve got to have a goal, so you can use the tools to help you.” When Apple Intelligence is here, there will be information as you create code that shows you what it’s done, but, Hare says finally, “It also says to you, ‘here are some other ways that you could also have done this’. So a lot of it helps you to ask a better question next time.”
