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Apple Partners with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to Create New Coding Centers→

Today Apple announced an expansion of its initiative of partnering with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to create hubs for training the next generation of coders. 10 new HBCU coding centers are being added throughout the US, from which nearly 500 teachers and community leaders will soon participate in “a virtual Community Education Initiative Coding Academy that Apple is hosting for all initiative partners.” During this training:

Educators will learn the building blocks of coding with Swift, Apple’s easy-to-learn coding language. Participants will work in teams to design app prototypes to address real community challenges. After completing the coding academy, educators will begin to integrate the coding and creativity curricula into their communities by launching coding clubs and courses at their schools, hosting community coding events, and creating workforce development opportunities for adult learners.

This announcement comes as Apple just last week shared updates to its lineup of coding resources for students, educators, and families alike, demonstrating the company’s investment in developing coding initiatives across all age groups. The move also follows Tim Cook’s open letter in June addressing racism in America and subsequent creation of a new $100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative by the company. The executive leading this initiative, Lisa Jackson, commented on today’s HBCU news saying:

“Apple is committed to working alongside communities of color to advance educational equity,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. “We see this expansion of our Community Education Initiative and partnership with HBCUs as another step toward helping Black students realize their dreams and solve the problems of tomorrow.”

These last couple months have seen many companies express a desire to work toward pursuing racial equality and justice, but true change takes more than just words, so I’m glad to start seeing the early fruits of Apple’s new commitments.

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University of Delaware Says “Apple Store” Coming On Campus

According to a new report by ifoAppleStore, the University of Delaware has confirmed that, as part of new campus construction plans, an Apple Store will be located next to the new Bookstore, Starbucks, and other facilities. The website says the university’s Board of Trustees announced an Apple Store will open inside the new bookstore opening this fall, although it’s not clear whether the “store” will be a full-feature retail location, a “mini store”, an authorized reseller, or something else specifically tailored to students. Indeed, several rumors in the past years suggested Apple was planning campus-specific Apple Stores, but the plans were never finalized.

ifoAppleStore also mentions the University of Delaware extended a contract with Barnes & Noble for 15 years, allowing them to demolish multiple buildings in the campus:

The project will include a new 60,000 square-foot bookstore, a Starbucks and other concessions. At its meeting yesterday, the university’s board said the new B&N bookstore will open August 30th, but didn’t say if the Apple store would open at the same time.

Apple already has a full-size retail store about six miles away from the University of Delaware, and that’s a very trafficked Apple Store considering Delaware has no sales tax. Smaller retail stores on campus would certainly make sense for Apple to showcase products like iPads and MacBook Airs and promote them among students, though we can’t help but think those would also be the perfect way to launch and organize discount programs without forcing students to use the online store, or driving to another Apple Store.

Apple Spotlights Four of the Distinguished Swift Student Challenge Winners

Image: Apple.

Image: Apple.

Earlier this year, Apple selected 350 students from around the world as winners of its annual Swift Student Challenge. From that talented pool, Apple picks 50 Distinguished Winners whose projects stand out from the others. Today, Apple highlighted the work of four of them: Taiki Hamamoto, Marina Lee, Luciana Ortiz Nolasco, and Nahom Worku.

Taiki Hamamoto. Image: Apple.

Taiki Hamamoto. Image: Apple.

Taiki Hamamoto built an app playground to teach people about the Hanafuda, a Japanese card game that he discovered many of his friends didn’t know. According to Apple’s press release:

While Hamamoto stayed true to the game’s classic floral iconography, he also added a modern touch to the gameplay experience, incorporating video game concepts like hit points (HP) that resonate with younger generations. SwiftUI’s DragGesture helped him implement dynamic, highly responsive effects like cards tilting and glowing during movement, making the gameplay feel natural and engaging. He’s also experimenting with making Hanafuda Tactics playable on Apple Vision Pro.

Marina Lee. Image: Apple.

Marina Lee. Image: Apple.

Marina Lee, is a computer science student at the University of Southern California. A call from her grandmother who was alerted to evacuate her home because of wildfires in the L.A. area inspired Lee to create EvacuMate to help users prepare an emergency checklist in case of evacuations like her grandmother’s. In addition:

Lee integrated the iPhone camera roll into the app so users can upload copies of important documents, and added the ability to import emergency contacts through their iPhone contacts list. She also included resources on topics like checking air quality levels and assembling a first-aid kit.

Luciana Ortiz Nolasco. Image: Apple.

Luciana Ortiz Nolasco. Image: Apple.

Luciana Ortiz Nolasco built BreakDownCosmic:

a virtual gathering place where users can add upcoming astronomical events around the world to their calendars, earn medals for accomplishing “missions,” and chat with fellow astronomers about what they see.

Ortiz Nolasco who is 15 and from Nuevo León, Mexico will attend WWDC with the other Distinguished Student Winners and plans to continue work on BreakDownCosmic when she returns home with the goal of releasing it on the App Store.

Nahom Worku. Image: Apple.

Nahom Worku. Image: Apple.

Nahom Worku grew up in Ethiopia and Canada and learned to code during the pandemic. Worku’s submission for the Swift Student Challenge app playground, AccessEd, is designed to offer educational resources in places where Internet connectivity doesn’t exist or is spotty.

Built using Apple’s machine learning and AI tools, such as Core ML and the Natural Language framework, the app recommends courses based on a student’s background, creating a truly personalized experience.

Congratulations to all of this year’s Swift Student Challenge winners. I’m always impressed with the projects we’ve learned about through Apple’s press releases and past interviews we’ve done on AppStories. It’s always a pleasure to watch a new generation of kids learn to code and become the developers whose apps I know we’ll cover in coming years on MacStories.

Whisky Shuts Down Project That Enabled Windows Gaming on Mac→

Not long ago, Isaac Marovitz, the developer behind Whisky, the open source WINE front-end that made it easy to play Windows games on a Mac, announced the project had come to an end. Whisky is how Niléane got Cities: Skylines 2 running on an M2 MacBook Air in 2023, and the project was well-regarded in the gaming community for its ease of use. In shutting down the project, Marovitz encouraged Whisky users to move to CrossOver, a paid app by CodeWeavers.

In an interview with Ars Technica’s Kevin Purdy, Marovitz said:

“I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it’s always a balancing act between my school work and dev work,” Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has “been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it,” Marovitz said, having received “a lot of questions” about the project status.

As Purdy explained for Ars Technica, Marovitz also became concerned that his free project threatened CrossOver, and by extension, WINE itself. Last week, CodeWeavers’ CEO wrote about the shutdown, to acknowledge Marovitz’s work and commend his desire to protect the WINE project.

It’s always a shame to see a project as popular and polished as Whisky discontinued. Some gamers may not like that CrossOver is a paid product, but I’m glad that there’s an alternative for those who want it.

To me though, the popularity and fragility of projects like Whisky highlight that a better solution would be for Apple to open its Game Porting Toolkit to users. The Game Porting Toolkit is built on CrossOver’s open source code. However, unlike the CrossOver app sold to gamers, Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is meant for developers who want to move a game from Windows to Mac. It’s not impossible for gamers to use, but it’s not easy either. I’m not the first to suggest this, and Valve has demonstrated both the technical and commercial viability of such an approach with Proton, but as WWDC approaches, a user-facing Game Porting Toolkit is near the top of my macOS 16 wish list.

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Apple Announces the Swift Student Challenge Will Begin in February 2024 and New Everyone Can Code Resources

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

It’s hard to believe that it has been over nine years since Apple announced the Swift programming language at WWDC. From the day it debuted, one of the pillars of Swift has been Apple’s education efforts, which have included Swift Playgrounds, materials for teachers and students, events, coding centers, and of course, the annual Swift Student Challenge at WWDC. So, with Swift’s 10th anniversary around the corner, it’s not surprising that Apple is updating its Swift Student Challenge program and releasing new resources for educators.

Today, the company announced that the next Swift Student Challenge will begin in February 2024, a break from the past WWDC schedule. The competition will name 350 winners in total, 50 of whom will be named Distinguished Winners whose projects stand out from the other submissions. Distinguished Winners will be invited to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino in the summer to meet with Apple engineers and other winners, and all winners will receive a one-year membership to the Apple Developer Program.

The Swift Student Challenge will run for three weeks in February 2024, and students can sign up to be notified of when the competition will begin here.

Apple is also expanding its Everyone Can Code program with four new projects providing additional resources for students to learn to build apps. The projects, which provide educators with resources to guide students, include the following:

  • Design a Simple App: Students can create an app prototype in Keynote to learn the fundamentals of app design, practice rapid prototyping, and collect feedback, following the same steps as professional developers. 
  • Build with Stacks and Shapes: Students can take the first steps of building an app in Swift Playgrounds and code a self-portrait or a work of art using SwiftUI to learn the fundamentals of user interface design.
  • Build Custom Shapes: Students can bring an app interface to the next level by designing a shape, learning how to plot the coordinates, and coding their custom shape using SwiftUI and the About Me sample app within Swift Playgrounds.
  • Design an App Icon: Students can learn and apply app design principles to create a unique and memorable app icon that communicates an idea; practice rapid prototyping; collect feedback; and upload the icon to Swift Playgrounds to become part of an app.

The projects can be accessed by educators from the Apple Education Community website.

The expansion of the Swift Student Challenge and other announcements today are great to see. It’s a fantastic way to get students excited about coding, as we’ve seen first-hand based on the growing number of apps we write about at MacStories that were built by former Challenge participants. I’m looking forward to seeing what students come up with this year.

MacStories Unwind: Road Trips, Casino Heists, and Apple Podcasts

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This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico and I compare road trip notes and somehow wind up talking about Federico’s fascination with casinos, before turning to the latest content updates to Apple Podcasts from Music and News.

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Road Trips

John’s Pick:

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The Weather App Adds More Detailed Data in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma

Apple’s Weather app is packing more data than ever before on iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. The thing about weather is that beyond the basics, everyone cares about different things, and some people care about it all. With Apple’s latest version of Weather, there’s more weather to nerd out on than ever before.

Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

The Weather app includes hourly precipitation predictions in its 10-day forecast detail view. Is there really a 45% chance of rain in Nashville a week from Monday? Probably not, but if that sort of precision is what you’re looking for in a weather app, Weather has it.

The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

Wind map overlays have been added to Weather, too. The overlay looks excellent and animates to show you which way the wind will blow over the next 24 hours. It’s a great addition if you’re going out to fly a kite or a drone, sail a boat, and more.

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The Verge Marks the iMac’s Silver Anniversary

Yesterday, the iMac turned 25, and The Verge had an excellent trio of articles, plus a visual history, covering the computer’s impact on Apple, the computer industry, and culture.

The series includes a look back at the introduction of the iMac in 1998 by Jason Snell and the many controversial design choices the iMac introduced like foregoing a floppy drive and including USB-A ports. The iMac also introduced color and transparency to consumer electronics that spread throughout the gadget world, but I agree with Jason’s take that the most important contribution of the iMac was that it pulled Apple back from the brink of financial disaster:

[P]erhaps the iMac’s strongest legacy is Apple itself. The company was close to bankruptcy when Jobs returned, and the iMac gave the company a cash infusion that allowed it to complete work on Mac OS X, rebuild the rest of the Mac product line in the iMac’s image, open Apple Stores, make the iPod, and set the tone for the next twenty five years.

The Grape iMac.

The Grape iMac.

Alex Cranz looked at how Apple marketed the iMac to college students at the turn of the millennium to build a foundation of life-long customers:

When it launched the iMac, it also launched a then exorbitantly pricey marketing campaign focused not just on traditional Mac owners but also students. “Being the first computer truly owned by a student entering college gives a company like Apple tremendous brand leverage over future computer loyalties,” Laine Nooney, a computer historian, professor at New York University, and author of The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal,told me over the phone. “That marketing isn’t just paying for a couple of years of sales… it’s helping create a generation of users.”

The M1 iMac.

The M1 iMac.

However, as important as the iMac has been to Apple historically, the lack of an update in over 800 days can’t be overlooked. The iMac’s role in Apple’s lineup is a shadow of what it once was. The Verge’s Monica Chin’s contribution to the site’s series wonders aloud what’s next for the all-in-one desktop:

The iMac was once the computer that everyone I knew had on their desk. That is now, without question, the MacBook. The laptop, as a category, has come so far and permeated culture so thoroughly in the past two decades that it’s hard to see any desktop — regardless of its purported numbers — as a mainstream option. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like the Mac Studio, the iMac leans more into a niche over the next few years. Maybe that’s offices that want a beautiful setup. Maybe that’s people with yellow bedrooms. 

Or maybe it’s the high-performance space. If there’s an opening in the market for a premium desktop like the Mac Studio, I don’t see why there’s not a larger one for a premium iMac. It could essentially be a MacBook Pro with a much larger built-in screen than any MacBook Pro can provide. Plus, maybe this one could also come in yellow.

My first Mac was a white plastic Intel-based iMac. I also owned an early aluminum model. However, other than testing a loaner M1 iMac, my Apple desktops in the years since have been Mac minis and my current Mac Studio paired with a MacBook Air for on the go.

I guess I’m part of the problem. I love the simplicity and elegance of the iMac, but the power and modularity of the Mac Studio paired with a laptop fit my needs much better these days. Still, my sense is there’s room for both a consumer-level iMac that serves as a shared family computer or a simple space-saving desktop solution and a more powerful, big-screen iMac for tasks like photo and video editing.

Rumors point to an iMac refresh this fall, so the drought should be over soon. I just hope what Apple introduces takes some chances aimed at broadening the iMac’s user base beyond where it is today.