Recently, Apple officially announced that it will host the WWDC 2024 Global Developers Conference from June 10-14. Prior to WWDC, there's another significant event concerning Apple developers—the annual Swift Student Challenge.
In April, Apple announced the winners of the 2024 Swift Challenge, and TapTechNews had the opportunity to interact with four Chinese winners, gaining insight into their impressive award-winning projects, and observing how the Swift programming language has bonded with these young developers, influencing both their learning and future careers.
The Swift Challenge, initiated in 2020, aims to provide thousands of students worldwide the opportunity to showcase their creativity and develop practical skills, benefiting both their careers and lives. This year, Apple added a new mechanism by selecting 50 outstanding winners among the 350 awardees, recognizing those who submitted excellent projects and inviting them to experience it at Apple's campus in Cupertino.
The first winner, Liu Xikai, a graduate student at Northeastern University, USA, created 'LiveArt,' an app inspired by his love for music and exquisite album covers. It transforms dynamic album artwork from AppleMusic into LivePhotos to be used as dynamic wallpapers, catering to users' pursuit of beautiful wallpapers.
During the development, Liu Xikai programmed a crawler using Swift to obtain video resources and employed AVFoundation to process the video files, successfully circumventing iOS system restrictions and innovating a new method to integrate standard wallpapers.
'LiveArt' left a profound impression on TapTechNews due to its high completion quality and excellent user experience, with its modern, minimalist interface design looking very polished.
The Chinese winners showcased their highly technical projects and shared insights about their learning processes with Swift, emphasizing practical learning through problem-solving and active participation in communities like Stanford's open Swift courses, HackingWithSwift, and various open-source platforms.
In parting, Shane Wei, Apple's Developer Relations Lead for Asia Pacific and Europe, expressed pride in supporting programming education to empower people worldwide with this crucial skill. He noted that maintaining a vibrant, thriving developer ecosystem is inherently tied to Apple's commitment to student developers, who are the fresh lifeblood of this ecosystem. This mutual connection promises a flourishing future both for the developers and the broader ecosystem.