A Touch of Something Different —

The Missing Gesture in SwiftUI

This short paper is based on iOS 13, Swift 5.x; It may work on an earlier version, but I didn’t test; a disclaimer.

The brief was to write a simple game to help his students learn French verbs. A task that is much harder the then it sounds, did you know for example that they’re twenty three different tenses in French, resulting in almost 100 variations of a common verb like avoir “to have”.

The goal to let students choose a verb and a tense and then correctly type in an answer. I ran up a POC in an hour or so with my five sample verbs the professor had given me. But I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like it cause the app needed to run on an iPhone, it was clearly the target platform. The problem the keyboard. Not only do you need nano sized figures to accurate hit keys or indeed surgeon steady hands, but worse the keyboard takes up half my screen when it comes up. I am left with next to no room to present anything.

Adding to my woes, Apple has just launched the iPhone SE; a budget [read popular with students] model with a even smaller screen.

The problem quite a specific one. I had suggested multiple choice. I had asked the professor. Non. ça ne marchera pas. He said was too easy, he needed his students to know the…