Playgrounds are such a wonderful feature of Xcode and the growing Swift ecosystem: they drastically lower the barrier for entry for learning the language and for experimenting. I have countless “experimental projects” that are just empty view controllers which have some interesting code snippet, and Playgrounds are a much better way of supporting this use case.

Erica Sadun has discovered an exciting new feature in Xcode Beta 5:

What you do is this, you add movie files to the playground’s resources. You can then add specialized playground rich text:

//: ![Alternate text](video width="width" height="height" poster="poster")

You won’t see the video until you render the rich text.

The markdown rendering and rich content embedded in Playgrounds is going to make them great for education. There’s nothing like running code to prove a point, and having educational content sit side-by-side with running code is a brilliant way to learn. I hope the project format for Playgrounds sees adoption on Linux and Windows so that more people can learn from them.