Good Things: SwiftUI on Mojave in iOS Playgrounds

Yes, you can upgrade to the Catalina Beta. Or, you can keep getting work done on Mojave and still enjoy the glory of SwiftUI exploration.

  1. Install Xcode 11 beta along side your 10.2.x Xcode
  2. Using the beta, create an iOS playground. (This won’t work with macOS, which attempts to use the native frameworks, which don’t  yet support SwiftUI)
  3. Import both SwiftUI and PlaygroundSupport.
  4. Set the live view to a UIHostingController instance whose rootView conforms to View.

Here’s an outline of the basic “Hello World” setup:

From there, you can create pages for each of your SwiftUI experiments, allowing you to build short, targeted applets to expand your exploration and understanding of the new technology.

4 Comments

  • Awesome!
    After spending an afternoon getting Catalina to install on an external drive, this solution might prove easier.

  • Unfortunately some features are not working in the playground (like VStack(alignment: .leading)). So you will be able to build simple layouts but not overly complex ones.