Mark Moeykens' Journal

[mark.moeykens]

WEATHER APP

Day 5

• If I deleted a city and then added a new one, the index got messed up within the TabView. I reorder the index values after deleting a city. This helps with programmatic navigation.
• Added progress view when first loading.
• Added Settings view to switch between Fahrenheit and Celcius.
• Added app icon.
• Clean up code, added comments on where to find more info on the Combine parts in my book.
• Tweaked UI, adjusted some padding, added background to hourly temps.

It’s done! Woo hoo!

[Pagasi]

Dude that design is smooth! I’m discovering just how tricky the design layouts can be just at the concept level. Yours looks great!

[mark.moeykens]

Hey, thank you so much, Pagasi!

[Chris_Ching]

It looks better than the standard weather app heheh

[mark.moeykens]

Thanks, Chris!

[Ralph42]

Your app looks great! Just to know how you did the data fetching with Swift Combine I bought you book https://www.bigmountainstudio.com/combine/z7bnj

[mark.moeykens]

Thank you for your support, Ralph! If you look in the code comments you’ll find references to specific parts of the book. Should get you pointed in the right direction to learn more in the book examples.

[Ralph42]

Thank you for writing & publishing the book It‘s a great help to learn Combine!

[mark.moeykens]

NBA STATS APP

So excited to do this again!
(My own reference to the challenge requirements.)

Day 1

• No coding, just research. Not much time today.
• Setup account with sportsdata.io and started the free trial
• Created an Xcode project in Xcode 13 beta 2. Could be taking a chance here.
• Found the API for scores
• Found the API endpoint for scores by date (to get yesterday’s data)
• Found the API endpoint for schedules (it’s on the same page, so that’s handy)

Team Images

• Looks like there’s a different endpoint called “Teams (All)” to get all the team images and color palettes?
• Could be interesting to use these colors in the UI.

Problems

• Thinking about how to cache the team info so I only need to get it one time. Thinking Core Data is a good solution, but man, I haven’t used Core Data for anything at work so I never really used it. Not sure how much time I want to invest in learning it.
• Anything I start to learn usually turns into a separate reference product which is very time-consuming. So first, I’m going to research quicker solutions and maybe have to learn Core Data after. This will be a good challenge for sure!

[mikaelacaron]

Core data is pretty easy to get up and running, Chris also has some awesome videos on this!!

iOS Core Data QuickStart Tutorial 2020

[Chris_Parker]

hahaha… “…turns into a separate reference product…”
I can’t wait.

[mark.moeykens]

NBA STATS APP

Day 2

Day of learning!

• Watched Chris’s video (thanks for your suggestion too, @mikaelacaron)
• Created a separate project to learn Core Data and play around with it
  
  
• Tried my hardest NOT to start a book but I need to jot down some notes!

Apple Pages is a good place to keep notes.

So I started a new “notebook”. Which may look like a book but it’s not…yet.

(Seriously, I have too much to do right now so this really is just a notebook.)

[Chris_Parker]

I can see you fighting the urge to make another book. “The force is too powerful Luke…”

[mark.moeykens]

NBA STATS APP

Day 3

• Got the app navigation layout. I’m going simple with a tab view.
• Got the API working to get today and yesterday scores.
• Then I was working on showing the future schedule and ran into a roadblock trying to decode the DateTime in the JSON. The error says:

Expected date string to be ISO8601-formatted.

I think Apple’s definition of iso needs a time zone. So I created a custom date format so I could decode with the help of this site:

extension DateFormatter {
    static let apiDateFormat: DateFormatter = {
        let formatter = DateFormatter()
        formatter.dateFormat = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss"
        formatter.calendar = Calendar(identifier: .iso8601)
        formatter.timeZone = TimeZone(secondsFromGMT: 0)
        formatter.locale = Locale(identifier: "en_US_POSIX")
        return formatter
    }()
}

This date format matches the API’s date format.

Then I had to use this date format for the JSONDecoder() so I built a custom class and a static property:

class JsonDecoder {
    static var forApiDateFormat: JSONDecoder {
        get {
            let decoder = JSONDecoder()
            decoder.dateDecodingStrategy = .formatted(DateFormatter.apiDateFormat)
            return decoder
        }
    }
}

Besides that, I got:

• The APIs working
• Minimal data showing on all 3 screens

So that’s a pretty good win for me.

[mark.moeykens]

NBA STATS APP

Day 4

Man, I hate to say this but I think I’m going to have to throw in the towel on this challenge!
There is a lot of exploratory research I want to do to make this work such as:

• Explore using the NSCache object
• Explore persisting with a file
• Explore persisting using Core Data

I think these topics could be a lot of fun to play with but then I look at other priorities on my plate right now:

• Updating 4 books
• House shopping
• Family time
• Recording videos

I’m overbooked!

So I didn’t make it very far.

My plan was to call the Teams (All) API endpoint and store all the team data locally. This API gets me this data:

struct TeamDO: Decodable, Identifiable {
    let id: Int
    var city = ""
    var name = ""
    var primaryColor = ""
    var secondaryColor = ""
    var tertiaryColor = ""
    var imageUrl = ""

    enum CodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
        case id = "TeamID"
        case city = "City"
        case name = "Name"
        case primaryColor = "PrimaryColor"
        case secondaryColor = "SecondaryColor"
        case tertiaryColor = "TertiaryColor"
        case imageUrl = "WikipediaLogoUrl"
    }
}

So I wanted to persist them and then when I got score info, I could access this local data and get the full team names, logos, colors.

Well, good luck to everyone else on the challenge!