Swift Playgrounds 1.5 offers expands coding education to robots, drones & musical instruments

Apple today announced that Swift Playgrounds, its educational coding app for iPad, will offer an exciting new way to learn to code using robots, drones and musical instruments.

Swift Playgrounds is perfect for students and beginners learning to code with Swift, Apple’s powerful and intuitive programming language for building world-class apps. Apple is working with leading device makers to make it easy to connect to Bluetooth-enabled robots within the Swift Playgrounds app, allowing kids to program and control popular devices, including LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, Sphero SPRK+, Parrot drones and more. The Swift Playgrounds 1.5 update will be available as a free download on the App Store beginning Monday, June 5.

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Motorola Moto Z2 Play and new Moto Mods coming to Canada in June

Barely a year since Lenovo's Motorola launched the modular Moto Z line of smartphones along with their Moto Mods accessories, we get word that the company has launched Moto Z2 Play as well as some new Moto Mods coming in June.

Designed with a thinner, lighter design and faster performance, the second generation Moto Z² Play delivers on the features you care about, while still offering transformative experiences with new Moto Mods. 

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Apple developers have earned over $70 Billion since 2008

Apple today announced that its global developer community has earned over $70 billion USD since the App Store launched in 2008. The App Store is home to the most innovative apps in the world and in the past 12 months alone, downloads have grown over 70 per cent.

"People everywhere love apps and our customers are downloading them in record numbers," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Seventy billion dollars earned by developers is simply mind-blowing. We are amazed at all of the great new apps our developers create and can’t wait to see them again next week at our Worldwide Developers Conference.”

Games make up the most popular types of apps on the App Store with 25% of the total, followed by business, education, lifestyle and entertainment.

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New Macs and iPads registered in Eurasia leading up to WWDC 2017

Monday's WWDC 2017 is going to be the first large Apple event since September last year and, while it is definitely a developer, OS and ecosystem-focused show; we are expecting some hardware announcements specially in product lines with some pent-up demand.

As availability of current MacBook Pros has dropped, in some places for multiple weeks, there's news of five new Macs and iPads registered in Eurasia, identified only with the model numbers A1289, A1347, A1418, A1419, and A1481, are likely to be new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros alongside a new 12-inch Retina MacBook. Also included four numbers classified under iOS 10 (A1671, A1709, A1670, and A1701), which could be attributed to iPad Pro SKUs. This, plus news of a smart Siri-powered speaker offer the biggest hardware expectations heading into WWDC 2017, which begins with a keynote on Monday June 5 at 10 am Pacific. 

I will be covering the WWDC 2017 keynote live, so stay tuned for all the news from Apple's biggest developer event.

Source: MacRumors.com