I’m currently working on some fun projects.
VRGear
The VRGear.com mobile app has been approved for public beta testing. Open this link from your iPhone and you’ll be taken to the TestFlight app to download the latest build.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/lO782vhj
Along with being a place to see the latest news posts from the VRGear.com tech blog, I’ll be implementing an Augmented realty experience that will feature different 3D models as wells simple ARKit experiences that users can try out. There are so many cool small projects that would be a lot of fun for people to try out. Awareness of what is possible is 90% of the problem there. Hopefully I can bring some awareness, if not entertain a small crowd of people.
An example of a cool AR Experience I created over Christmas break was a photo-identifier App that would anchor 3D Words to an image as soon as the iPhone camera detected the image. I focused the project on pictures of family members, showing their name age, and birthday. This type of simple AR App was built entirely without code inside of the Reality Composer app that was released last fall 2019. The projects can be authored and shared right from the App to anyone with an iPhone capable of running iOS 12+.
Photonify
I’ve been tinkering with different photography technologies the can be leveraged inside of iOS. The grand plan for the Photonify App is to provide the entire Photonify.com photo filter catalogue to our subscribers. I think we only a few short months away from that becoming a reality.
For now, the Photonify App will be central in helping mobile users learn more about the brand and the product offerings on our website.
I’ve learned a great deal about the WordPress API and RESTful APIs in general. I’ve had tons of help from the iOS Developer community. There are some wicked smart people that are part of the slack group! Thanks, guys!
The Little Bread Boy (final name pending)
The final App project that I’ve been spending some time on is a Bread Delivery App. It’s been a fun project that has taught me some new skills – and I still have more to learn before the project is done.
By the end of that effort, I’ll have built an e-commerce website, a mobile iOS App, a server-hosted backend with user accounts and payment processing, and a push notification server that sends reminders of upcoming deliveries, recurring order confirmation, and notifications to serve up some advertisement (new feature that iOS apps can leverage if the user opts-in).
Learning New Skills
I the mean time, I’m blitzing through all the Hacking With Swift tutorials created by Paul Hudson. That guy is amazing! I finished all 800 pages of his Hacking with Swift (SwiftUI version) and now I’m about 300 pages into his Hacking with Swift (UIKit version).
I’ve basically gone in reverse order. UIKit is a much older technology and has a long history of refinement and a massive user-base. Essentially every iOS developer in the world uses UIKit for user interface design. Well, I started really digging deep into iOS Development with SwiftUI, and I have been initially indoctrinated that swift development on iOS is a reactive-type programing paradigm.
After being indoctrinated by Paul Hudson in the ways of SwiftUI, I’ve had to contort my brain to grasp everything that I going on with UIKit as different menues, buttons, and navigation screens are cobbled together with a strange combination of Xcode menus tweets and check boxes and code. With SwiftUI, every element of every interface I’ve built has been 100% code. So, Interface Builder in Xcode is simply confusing – and adding constraints every time I want a new visual element on the screen seems so backward and archaic.
But, that’s just me. I’m all-in with SwiftUI. I Love the feature set. I love the development process, and I’m too new to know any different. and I REALLY like it that way!!
I’m still going to complete all the UIKit learning that will help me develop with either technology – but, for the speed and ease of SwiftUI had me at “Hello, World!”