I decided to get a taste of the Animations course but I feel like I might come back to it another time!
i knew it was the right move to introduce an old layout but different style, it helps keep things familiar 
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halfway through programmatic UI! I again am very much enjoying how laid out it is, every detail that is normally glazed over is being explained and my brain is able to wrap around it.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the names of these sections and I think I got it. The names are Course(Foundations) Module(Module1: The War Card Game) and Lecture/Lesson(Lesson 1: Xcode Essentials). The vernacular on the site is lesson, but in the coding and the url it is referred to as a Lecture. So now I can pinpoint lessons I suppose
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I don’t know if you can pinpoint lessons, unfortunately
It was the same practice layout when auto layout was first introduced. Module 1 Lesson 2 and 3 from the Foundations course.
Woot! just finished the CoreML Course! It was fascinating! I think the last three courses were all my favorites. The plan is to head back and slog through the bentos now. There is definitely a lot to learn over there, then I have to decide. Do I go back and start with the new SwiftUI courses? I dunno. The CoreML Course was done with SwiftUI and that was my first exposure to it. I didn’t even realize that there was a live preview of the view in SwiftUI lol that caught me off guard. But now that I’ve seen it I realize its just a shorthand way to setup your views, and could probably help me long term but I feel like its time for me to start writing my own apps in earnest. either that or go study some animation software so that I can put the animations. I want to have an animated stick man. I’m not entirely sure on the format of the animation, I had assumed .gif because I’ve seen several places where you can integrate .gif files pretty easy, but only small ones. I may just need to have the animations online and have the app grab them from the web when needed… maybe save them in cache I dunno. haven’t gotten that far.
I don’t think you need to learn the Bentos. They are just there for you if you need to implement certain features into your own custom app. They are like lego pieces that you can snap into your app. You don’t need to do the Bentos course.
I can’t wait to see when you have built your first app!
Okay so yesterday I launched into my music flash card app. Its not really my first app since I did that sight word flash card app for my kids, but it does still have the feel of a first app. I didn’t even buy the $99 membership to publish the first one for my kid so I just load it up on his ipad once each week lol. So for the new app I did the design on paper. Figma is nice, but still clunky for me to use. I ended up with 7 View Controllers with all the general links between them. The MAIN problem I keep running into is realizing that I’m going down a rabbit hole I don’t need to go down. Trying to just get the skeleton of the app up and running is a very straightforward process that needs to be done first, and I immediately got bogged down on things like. customizing my own navigation controllers, tweaking button shapes and placements, playing with fonts. I mean you name it and it wants to rob my scarce half to maybe one hour of time I get to put into this thing each morning. Anyways this morning I over slept and basically tried to tinker with it throughout the day, this never goes well normally, the instant I look at my mac a baby starts screaming or something of the sort, but today I was able to get about half of the UI up and linked to each other. This was when I got distracted by trying to customize nav bars and making my own nav bar which… no. bad Joe bad. So I ripped all that out and just installed a nav bar and immediately realized that there’s a lot more to nav bars than I had remembered. I’m going to need to install my own nav buttons, and look into customizing the nav bar itself beyond the basic large text, font color and such. gonna want to match it to my theme. I’m pretty happy with how things are progressing. I was able to complete what I was tinkering with today as far as skeletal layout is concerned and tomorrow will be able to start a new section of the UI. Storyboard all the way people! Its not time to stop and go lookup coding right now, I’m doing whatever I can any way I know how to do it lol.
ps. I did not do the bentos, but while going down one rabbit hole about animation, I did discover and read up on the Lottie animations. didn’t realize there was a bento about that until after lol. I also had already done the scroll bar bento when working on my previous app. But I looked through them and I will definitely be using these as supplements. Its clear to me though, I just need to get some of my own work out and published before digging any deeper
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It’s definitely time for a brush up on github I’m not at a point where I could break my app really because I’m just messing with UI and setting up tableviews and nav bars but I’m approaching that point very soon. I also have already broke my original design so I need to step back and rework the view controllers I’m going to need for streamlining the app flow. sigh oh well! Back to work!
What do you mean by ‘break your app’
Well I almost did it already @Pratham_Hebbar hahaha I just spent two days trying to implement a table view with a custom cell so that I can put three different things in each cell of the table and manipulate them. I found a handy tutorial on exactly what I wanted and put it in but when I modified it to match my app’s needs Xcode about exploded with errors hahaha today I basically just debugged until the last bug which was something about an optional unwrapping as nil and gave up for a while. Then I came back later, just pressed play and Bam! It worked lol! I’m happy with the days work, I started on another view controller but didn’t get far at all, decided I needed to remap my design entirely, so now the app only has 5 views instead of 7
PS I still haven’t setup my GitHub, how much of a glutton for punishment am I lol tomorrow! That’s my assignment tomorrow… certainly not the switchUI I definitely need to avoid that switch for now lol. It digs into the next problem which is going to be setting up a cache to track all the switches
Thanks Francis! I’m gonna be doing that tomorrow, today I was trying to prepare so I went hunting for the first UiKit app we wrote where we did GitHub but even with the fantastic organization of topics I wasn’t finding it. Then I stumbled on @MikaelaCaron ’s GitHub videos nicely done!! I watched 2.5 of those today and I will use the Francis link as well… this is all assuming of course that the 4 month old let’s me do anything lol!!
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GitHub is up and running! I overslept though so I only had about 15 minutes to do it, I didn’t get to do anything but set it up. I hit a small snag but I was able to work through it pretty quickly. Today I called my buddy who also tinkers with code to basically help me manage my time. I’ll be calling him once a week to go over my progress or lack of progress. What that means is I gotta go back into GitHub and check into having him added to be able to download my (currently set to private) code. He doesn’t know Swift he’s more of an oversight/big picture guy. And can help me see where My design choices are flawed. So I have a team now! This is getting exciting
Edit: team member added on GitHub, also got the GitHub app
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good day’s work this morning! woke up on time, baby woke up too but decided as long as I hold him he can sleep some more lol
Let me just tell you how much freedom and peace of mind Git Branches can bring! while working on my first app I was trying to set up a timer so that my son could run his sight work flashcards and see how fast he was going, I know he would have loved it, but about halfway into making the timer I started to break things! the app stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why! UNDO UNDO! I put a set of /* */ around all the timer code, got it to work, and never touched that thing again… my poor son never got his timer
today however, I had a working UI for the music flashcard app and started working on the model, but before doing so, I created a branch. Huge sigh of relief. I broke things left and right, deleted files, copy and pasted huge pieces of code just because I could lol. Everything still works for the moment, and progress is being made.
also at this mid stage of the game I decided maybe I should um… //tell myself what my code is actually for lol.
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Just took a late hour to work on the code… realized that by making my model inside a view controller it’s super hard to extricate to it’s own file because so many variables… not even sure it’s worth it, I need to look at some other peoples models to see proper methods here.
The app is coming together nicely though! All the programming is pretty much easy from here on out. Now the hard part will actually be assets. Do I make gif files? I dunno. Do I try to learn to do some simple animations? Geez that’s a huge job. I know I can get the app to my students in a beta form and get huge benefits… at least for those with iPhones lol! But I want complete mutability on my files so I need to put the assets on my website and download them to the app and cache instead of preloading assets on the app… still a lot of work to do. And don’t even get me started on making it look good, that’s a huge headache waiting to happen lol
Use Figma to make the assets and follow some good design practice videos.
Good luck with writing the app!
Now I’m thinking I could preload some basic images on the app, and then have the app check for available images to download to replace those images? not sure how I would code that really, because the new file would have to be the same name as the old one for the code to recognize it as the image I need since I call the images with UIImage(named: “Cat”) lol I’m sure there are many solutions to this