dick applebaum

tallest skil said:

It’d be great if iCloud Drive indexed the contents of your files so you could, you know, actually search through them while on the go, instead of having to go back to your Mac to use Spotlight on local machine’s copy of them…

Jeeze TS... what you describe is FDBs forte — you can have dbs with an unlimited number of indexes tailored to fast, ad hoc search needs... in fact, a FDB db can be indexes-only — with no underlying data dB.

My granddaughter teaches young children, while attending college.  She currently is in Northern Italy working as an au pair for a family with 2 young children (and still taking online college courses)...

I asked her to review the keynote and give me her thoughts -- good, bad, ugly:

Thoughts- As you know I’m pretty against technology in the classroom such as tv’s and computers, but I also work with younger age groups where technology is more hurtful rather than helpful. Its distracting and overuse can lead to focusing issues. That being said, I like the idea for older children.  The price seems reasonable $329 isn’t too crazy, I think it should be something that the school provides for the children rather it being an expense each family has to pay. (But then you have a whole other issue on whether schools are allocating their money to the right things like paying teachers higher wages LOL) I have used an app for role call and it needed a lot of work when I had it, but I like how easy it was, so they could be very useful for teachers.

I didn’t watch all of the keynote because its over an hour and its almost 10 here lol

There's also a lot of Swift activity involving the Apple/IBM partnership, for example:

Sorry, in advance for a series of large web page pics -- but they tell quite a story...




https://developer.apple.com/ibm/

If you follow the links to the IBM site and drill down you see things like this:



https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer

and this:



https://console.bluemix.net/developer/appledevelopment/dashboard

and this:


https://console.bluemix.net/developer/appledevelopment/sdks-and-tools

GeorgeBMac said:

Apple ClassRoom looks like a fabulous foundation for a great product.
But, to succeed, it will need great apps on top of it that provide high quality learning material.

Also, education is moving out of of the centralized classroom with the teacher acting as an orchestra conductor towards more independent learning -- both in the classroom as well as outside of the classroom.  I am hopeful that Apple can anticipate and incorporate that trend into their educational products...

I think it's important for Apple to do this quickly because momentum is building against them:
Not only are students and teachers becoming immersed and indoctrinated into the Google learning environment, so too are school IT administrators becoming more comfortable administering and maintaining that hardware and software environment.
... Once it reaches critical mass...

Already has been done:

No more pencils, no more books, no more clunky desktop PCs or laptops either. Instead, a private school in Scotland has given sleek new iPads to every single one of its pupils to use in class and to even take home, nixing the excuse that the dog ate their homework.
It’s the brainchild of Fraser Speirs, the IT director of Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, who wanted to solve the problem of the school’s computer lab, which had 12 desktops and 12 laptops, constantly being overbooked.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2010/09/02/the-school-that-gives-kids-their-own-ipads/#66a8403e31f9

Soli said:

I also found this which goes over scripting in Swift. That said, it looks like it's just running in the command line using a BASH shell, so is that not possible now with Automator?

• https://krakendev.io/blog/scripting-in-swift

That' a pretty old page -- June 30, 2015...

He was using Swift 1.2 -- that's baby Swift (notice the println) -- were on Swift 4.x now and open sourced.



That is not a bash script!  The shebang in line 1 identifies it as a Swift script.

You could call a bash script which then invoked the Swift script -- but that's just busy work.


The reason I think this is so important is this:

If you've ever done a server-side install of an app, even simple apps require downloads and installs of multiple supporter apps and packages -- each with their own prerequisite downloads and installs.  This is a very long, fiddly, cryptic, error-prone, interactive process... if you're on your toes, and know enough about CLI scripts you can:

1. detect errors
2. determine the cause
3. determine the recovery action required
4. perform that action
5. rinse and repeat

Kinda' reminds one of a Windows install in the late 1990s...


Swift offers the potential of a great improvement as the Swift scripts:

1. are [non-CLI expert] human-readable as well as machine-executable
2. are better able to detect errors, determine the cause,  determine the recovery action and perform that action
3. offer improved probability of a successful installation
4. allow the user to concentrate on the results (the app) rather than the complex esoteric  installation process
5. require less user-interaction baby-sitting the installation process