My thanks to NSShadowcat (and the lovely Mayur Dhaka) for sponsoring BirchTree this month. At its core, NSShadowcat is a site that links to great content around the web, and sometimes ventures into really interesting original content.

WWDC is this coming week and you can bet NSShadowcat will be pushing out a ton of new content reflecting on the event. You should subscribe now so you don't miss a thing.

In the meantime you should check out this recent piece on why Swift Playgrounds should come to the iPad:

Playgrounds are a really really powerful medium for learning Swift. Nearly every Swift tutorial I’ve come across that didn’t need to be an iOS app, was explained through a Playground. One of the reasons (the one that stood out to me the most) for this is that Playgrounds allow you to add stylised text (headings, lists etc.) and the output for functions, inline with your code. So, if you call a function add(2,3), the live output, in this case 5, can be displayed right under the line where the function was called. The official Swift blog has some pictures for illustrations.