Tag Archives: swift

Accountability for not being Accountable

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Well, I guess I’ve failed a bit at updating the progress on my Quirky US Explorer app. I’ve been working on it pretty steadily over the last month or so, but I haven’t been doing my part in letting others know my progress.

Well, as it stands, the app is complete and most of the features that I wanted are included. There will always be something to add, but for now I think it’s a decent place to release it. I am still doing some cleanup work to the various displays in order to keep them consistent with each other and easy for a user to understand.

The hard part is staying focused. It is far more fun to add features than to clean things up. I also struggled with the work of adding new locations to explore. I finally managed to get enough to feel it is useful. There is at least one place to explore in each state. This meant researching locations and then deciding which ones to add. Once that happened, I had to make sure I had all the needed information along with an image for each one. It wasn’t always easy finding all of that, but I think I managed to pull it off.

If everything goes right, by the end of the week I’ll have it available for at least preorder. It took longer than it should have, but things happen. I just need to buckle down and get the last stretch finished before I get busier with other things.

I guess that gives a bit of a rundown for where things stand right now.

For now, here are some images from the app to enjoy while you wait for more!

Quirky US Explorer map view
This is a list of all the states divided by your your
This is the state view that allows you to scratch off the state to reveal its details including sites to visit in that state.

My Newest Little Project

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Sometimes it is worth stepping back from work related projects and focus on something that you find more fun. Over the last month or so, I started to work on a couple of these fun little projects.

The project I’m going to show here is a sand simulator. There is a short animated gif shown below.

This project came from watching a Youtube video where someone explained creating their own version of a sand simulation. I used many of their ideas, but implemented them in my own ways. What you see above is the current version of what I have been playing with. The app includes 8 different types of particles that interact with each other in different ways. Sand will pile up like sand does. Water attempts to level itself. Snow and ice pile up in their own ways and fire will turn water, ice or snow into steam that will rise off the screen.

There were many interesting techniques used to make this all happen with the main movement based on Cellular Automata theories. Each particles moves by looking at it’s surrounding neighbors and then decided how to move. For the most part, they only care about the 8 locations directly surrounding them. As simple as that sounds, it allows for some interesting and occasionally surprising interactions.

Doing this project let me work through some interesting programming issues, while at the same time giving me something fun to play with. A majority of the code fits in around 400 lines and it does everything you can see above.

So, if you find yourself stuck – step back and find a small project that appeals to you and work on that. It will not only better your programming skills, but it will also allow your brain to reset before you return to your actual work.

Huh… So Much For Once A Week

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I thought I’d follow up a bit with what I’ve been up to over the last few weeks. I have been hard at work on my newest version of my Time Clock Helper app. It is almost ready for release, I’m working on some help screens right now, but other than that it all works. It does several things that the original app didn’t do, so that is handy. It also gives the user more control over what they will see on the screen and how they interact with it.

It has been slow going since I’ve been working on learning SwiftUI at the same time. I like it for the most part, but some parts of SwiftUI are a bit unclear, or unstable. I have learned a lot, though. It makes it nice going between different devices and letting Swift take care of making sure everything is laid out in a decent manner. It sure beats the hours I used to have to spend getting constraints just right for a storyboard. Changes can now take seconds to implement that used to take minutes or hours before.

So, yeah. SwiftUI has been worth the effort to learn and it promises to get easier and more powerful in the future.