My iOS app journey

It’s been awhile since I blogged, so I thought I should provid an update.

In the autumn of 2018 I started developing as iOS app as a hobby. Previously, I worked through the “iOS Development with Swift” book. The book leads you through the process of building an app. By the end of the book you have created a multi-screen functional app which lets you enter and sort books. I enjoyed the process and wanted to build my own.

I decided to build an app that will let me store quotes. I like keeping quotes and snippets in a journal. A quotes app is something I would use and I can envision.

I drew my initial ideas on paper and started working. I made some progress, but my hand drawn screens left a lot to be desired. I found myself creating different layouts in XCode and not making progress.

I decided to take a step back and get a better idea of what my screens should look like. I downloaded Adobe XD and created a mockup. I chose XD because it is free and I found the onboard tutorial easy to follow. I shared my mockups with the dev.to community. I altered some of the screens based on feedback I received. I felt pretty good with the design at this point. It was time to start coding again!

So far I have screens for viewing, adding and editing a quote. I can also add a background image for it and alter the alpha so the text is visible against the image. For the main screen I have created a layout similar to Netflix. This took me awhile to figure out. Fortunatley I found some good tutorials that helped me out ( Build That App: AppStore and iOS Tutorial: Want your Swift app to scroll in two directions, like Netflix? Here’s how.).

I’m currently working on adding a tagging feature. My next step will be to add a datastore.

I schedule time each week to work on it. I usually have forty-five minutes to an hour and a half at a time, three days a week. The timeframe doesn’t really let me get into a flow. But I’m slowly chipping away at it!