Sprites classes have been completed and I’m kinda sad its over, there’s just sooo much here and we’ve barely scratched the surface. any recommendations on where I should go to continue work on Game apps? @fuerte.francis
I plan to move on to programmatic UI for now and I’ll probably follow it with Core ML just to get to the end of the UIKit series… and I still need to slog through the bentos, but two of the apps that I want to write would be best set as a game app with sprites I think. I have a lot to pursue there.
I suggest taking a look at the bentos its really helpful tidbits of info… Will help you experiment more with your apps… For spritekit paul hudson or some other ios tutorial might have some better courses for it… Its quite hard to find an updated spritekit tutorial though
started the Programmatic UI group of modules, I’m still not sure what to call each section lol. I just inspected the website code and it looks like they are actually called courses. So I started the Programmatic UI Course today and ran through 2 modules pretty quick. this definitely does a good job answering some questions I had and already bugged @MikaelaCaron and @fuerte.francis about lol sorry guys! I suppose I should just do the classes sometimes instead of asking a million questions. I also like the idea of redoing an app from the Foundations Course to add some familiarity to a pretty scary thing like going storyboardless. Well done!
I was able to build the same practice layout from the foundations course but programmatically. It was a nice exercise which did bring back some nostalgia.
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
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.
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
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!
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!!
