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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Leaked image shows the Lumia smartphone that could have been

Microsoft has dropped out of the mobile hardware space with its Lumia 550, 650, 950 and 950 XL as the last models a few years ago. A leaked image of a Lumia prototype gives us a glimpse of where Microsoft was headed. Outfitted with a Snapdragon 820 processor, 23 megapixel camera and an aluminium unibody the prototype, outed on Baidu, shows a departure from the Lumia design playbook.

Word has it that Microsoft hasn't given up on its own mobile devices, specially now that the Surface brand is gaining ground in notebooks and tablets, it may be a good time to introduce a new Windows 10 smartphone.

Source: WindowsCentral