Yesterday I gave a talk at the Cologne Swift meetup and I tried something new. I used a Swift Playground for the “Slides”.

Functions - Basics I.xcplaygroundpage 2016-04-22 09-22-36 These are my takeaways:

Presentation mode

Xcode has a presentation mode. But as the resolution of the beamer may be different to the resolution of your Mac, you might have to change the font size to make all the text fit on the screen for each slide and still be readable.

Takeaway #1: Anticipate that the “slides” look a bit different on the beamer.

Too many pages

At the end the Playground had 49 pages. This seems to me a bit too much for Xcode 7.3. During preparation Xcode crashed several times and the day before the presentation my Mac froze completely and had to me forced rebooted.

Takeaway #2: Next time I will split the Playground into several smaller ones.

Answering questions

Even though I was a bit worried that the Xcode could crash, it was nice to be able to answer small questions right away in the live Playground. I could change something in the code to answer the question or to figure out what the question actually is about. This was really nice.

Takeaway #3: Answering questions is a lot easier when you can show the working (or crashing) code live in the Playground.

You might have noticed in the screenshot that I have added “buttons” to navigate to the previous and next slide. This is done using emoji and the @previous and @next keywords. Unfortunately you cannot map the actions to the arrow keys. So you have to click on the “buttons” with the cursor.

Takeaway #4: Cannot be controlled with keys or a clicker (yet).

Conclusion

I really enjoyed to present an introduction to Swift in a Playground and will use it again, when the topic is appropriate.

The Playground I used is on github. You can use it for you own talk. I would appreciate if you have a link to the original Playground somewhere in it (don’t need to be shown during the talk).