Category Archives: Swift

Cranky Cannon – Amusing Physics Fun With A Twist.

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Cranky Cannon was a game that I had wanted to make for a while. From a young age, I was fascinated by mechanical devices. But, there was one item in a museum that I grew up with that has really stuck in my head – an anti-aircraft gun. It was in a mining museum, but it also covered how the iron mines influenced WWII. The gun was part of that display. To make it even better, you could sit in the gun and operate cranks to turn the base and adjust the elevation.

The physical controls fascinated me, so I decided to create a game that mimicked that idea – thus Cranky Cannon was born.

If you have an Apple device feel free to take a look. One crank operates the elevation and the other sets the power for the gun. Yes, all the gears turn when you operate the crank. The game involves many sound effects – including a bit of layering of different sounds to give the gears even more life.

‎Cranky Cannon
‎Cranky Cannon
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‎Cranky Cannon
Developer: Ducky Planet LLC
Price: $0.99

SwiftUI – The Best Interface Builder That Wants Me Dead.

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I have been spending a lot of time trying to build an interface for a new version of one of my apps. I had a layout that was working visually, but unfortunately SwiftUI wasn’t up to making it work as it should. I have remade it multiple times over the last week in order to get buttons and pickers to work as they should.

Finally, tonight things started to work. I wish I could explain why they didn’t work in the first place, but oh well. It isn’t perfect and I still have a lot of things to add, but it is working.

I really like the idea of SwiftUI. It offers a nice escape from the usual interface builder and the never ending fight with constraints. But, it still has a lot of bugs that need to be squashed before it will really take off.

For me, my two fights were problems deleting pickers in a list, or making the keyboard pop up and work properly with those pickers. Most apps aren’t going to use a collection of pickers that need to be added and deleted, so my problems won’t help many of you. I ended up having to do some odd workarounds to make the delete happen. The keyboard issue kind of fixed itself in the process of attempting a ton of different ideas. I have since cleared out close to 200 lines of code that were added during my attempts to make it work. The most surprising part – it STILL WORKS. Yeah, I’m as shocked as you are.

If you want to develop your app with SwiftUI, go for it – but only if you have some time to work around its internal issues.

Here is a link to a page that answers many basic questions about SwiftUI and also a great rundown of the various features and how to use them: Fucking SwiftUI.