From left: Vincent Neo and Zerui Wang. Photo: Apple
For most student developers, winning Apple’s Swift Student Challenge once is a milestone. For Vincent Neo and Zerui Wang, it’s become something of a habit. Now each a three-time winner, the two Singaporean students have taken very different paths to success – Vincent with Pinouts, a 3D circuit reference tool aimed at reducing wiring errors for engineers, and Zerui with Unsung Stories, an interactive narrative experience that gives voice to overlooked individuals in our everyday lives. Despite the contrast in themes, both apps show a deeper maturity in how they approach user experience, storytelling, and the evolving possibilities of Swift Playgrounds. In this conversation with HWZ, the two share how their coding journeys have shifted over the years, the hurdles they faced, and what continues to drive their curiosity in a rapidly changing tech landscape.
Q: This year marks your third Swift Student Challenge win – an impressive achievement for both of you. How has your approach to app design and development evolved since your first submission?
Vincent Neo: My submission this year is very different from those in 2020 and 2021. Previously, I focused on nostalgic re-imaginings with more emphasis on fun rather than functionality. This year, Pinouts was more practical – it’s a reference tool for chips and connectors, meant to reduce wiring and reference errors in circuits. From a development standpoint, I’ve learned to code more efficiently. My understanding of Swift has matured, and Apple’s newer APIs, especially in SwiftUI, have helped streamline things. I’ve managed to get more done with less code, and the results are more performant as well.
Zerui Wang: It’s been a long journey for me too. My first submission focused on teaching graph theory, and I was primarily interested in the technical side of development. This year’s Unsung Stories was completely different. It required a lot of upfront planning: sketching scenes, drafting dialogue, designing mini-games. I also paid a lot more attention to user experience, storytelling, and emotional impact. I reviewed and iterated the project more than thirty times. Every animation and sound cue was designed to serve the story. That process really taught me that building apps isn’t just about technical execution – it’s about creating something that resonates with people.
Zerui's Unsung Stories app. Photo: Apple
Q: Both of your apps took on very different themes – Vincent with circuit workflows, and Zerui with narrative storytelling. What gaps did you identify in existing tools that motivated you to pursue your projects, and how did Swift and Apple’s frameworks help you realise them?
Vincent: Most existing apps in the engineering space focus on drawing circuits or PCB design. They're advanced, but they don’t help users understand a chip’s pin layout or how it looks physically. That’s where Pinouts comes in. Manufacturers usually provide pin diagrams in 2D documents, but these can be confusing. Especially for symmetrical chips or connectors with many pins. One wrong connection and you could cause a short or damage the component. I created 3D models of connectors so users could interactively see which pin corresponds to which function just by tapping or hovering. RealityKit made it surprisingly manageable, even though I had no prior 3D modelling experience. Features like built-in camera controls and BillboardComponent helped me display pin info above the models with minimal setup. I also added a 2D mini diagram using SwiftUI’s Canvas API, which dynamically changes based on pin selection.
Zerui: For me, the motivation behind Unsung Stories was a sense of disconnection in our fast-paced digital lives. I’m a tech geek myself, so I see how tech is often used to optimise productivity but I wanted to use it to slow things down and reconnect us with the people around us. The app is built around characters you might see every day – the hawker uncle, the janitor, the old man on the bus – but never really notice. Indie RPGs inspired the interactive storytelling. Scenes and mini-games change based on user choices, and the background music and colour palette shift to reflect the story’s mood. One major technical hurdle was storing over 300 hand-drawn illustrations within Swift Playground’s 20MB limit. Each image had to be around 60KB, which was nearly impossible with standard formats like PNG. After some research, I switched to Apple’s HEIC format, which offered excellent compression. That let me pack all 300 images into the app without compromising too much on visual quality.
Q: Given the emphasis on education and accessibility in both your apps, what do you feel makes Swift Playgrounds uniquely suited to building beginner-friendly or learning-focused projects?
Vincent: Swift Playgrounds and SwiftUI really lower the barrier of entry. Even someone with just an iPad can start coding. The syntax is clean and beginner-friendly, which helps keep people motivated instead of frustrated. The app even supports a tutorial-style format, where users can interactively learn to code—perfect for educational tools. I think it's a great platform to prototype ideas quickly while focusing more on creativity and less on setup.
Zerui: I agree. I love how I can jump straight into coding without wrestling with environment setups or boilerplate code. Swift Playground has a structure similar to Xcode projects, so it’s easy to scale from a small concept to something more polished. That immediacy is great when inspiration strikes—you just open your device and start experimenting. For educational and narrative-driven apps, that’s a huge plus.
Vincent's Pinouts app. Photo: Apple
Q: Apple’s recent pushes into AI integration and spatial computing – like Vision Pro –are reshaping how developers think about the future. How do you see these technologies influencing your future app ideas or your career paths?
Vincent: There’s definitely room to integrate AI into my existing apps. For example, I’m exploring AI-based weather predictions for my app Environment, and maybe transcription or translation tools in Pigeon, which is a Telegram client for watchOS. AI is going to be essential for coding and product development in the near future, whether for better efficiency or adding smarter features. I also think Pinouts could work well on Vision Pro. Spatial computing could make referencing technical documentation during circuit building feel seamless. Imagine wearing a headset and having your circuit, reference tools, and diagrams right in front of your workspace – that’s powerful.
Zerui: Xcode’s predictive AI features are already changing how I work. The context-aware code suggestions really help when you’re dealing with unfamiliar APIs or when you’re offline. It speeds up debugging and prototyping significantly. As someone who works with 3D models, I’m also excited about the potential of spatial computing. Interpreting CAD models on a 2D screen has its limits, and being able to manipulate and visualise them in 3D space could reduce prototyping cycles from days to minutes. That’s a big leap for design workflows.
Q: Finally, what advice would you offer to aspiring young developers aiming to enter the next Swift Student Challenge?
Vincent: Treat the Challenge as a real challenge. Push yourself to learn new tools and APIs. Every year, I made it a point to try something I’d never done before – like RealityKit this year, or experimenting with unique SwiftUI layouts in the past. This approach not only made the process more rewarding but also helped me build apps that genuinely solved problems or explored new ideas. You grow the most when you’re not just repeating what you already know.
Zerui: Just start. Really – just do it. Begin early, experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. Use all the resources you can find online, but don’t be afraid to hack together something completely different. Your passion – whether it’s AI, music, or environmental science – can become the backbone of something unique. Unsung Stories came from my personal reflections, and I think that authenticity really showed through. Tell your own story. The process itself is just as important as the outcome, so enjoy it.