You've Come A Long Way, Baby

Spendu, version 1.0.0, is finally out! Apple approved my first app for sale in the App Store a couple of days ago and it feels awesome to finally realize one of my personal goals. I thought it would be fun take a look back on Spendu then and now just to see how far it's come.
 

Customizing UINavigationItem

When an app you are writing is intended to have a highly customized look one of the things that may get special treatment is the UINavigationItem for view controllers that are managed by a UINavigationBar object.

Each UIViewController has its own UINavigationItem property that is pushed or popped by a UINavigationBar object that lays out navigation bar at the top of the view. 

I had two goals. 1) Drop custom left and right bar button items and custom text on the navigation bar and 2) Customize the animations between the navigation items in the navigation bar. So I needed to sub-class UINavigationBar for 2). And I needed to create a custom UINavigationItem that I could reuse everywhere and give the app a consistent look and feel. This would satisfy 1).

Finally, A Sprint-Sprint!

I imagine SCRUM uses the term "sprint" for development iterations to emphasize the quickness of the cycles to deliver shippable functionality. As I've written about before, I'm implementing a one-man SCRUM development team. This last sprint began seven days ago and was complete last night.

That was, by far, my fastest development sprint since starting the project. I believe there were two main reasons why I was able to accelerate my development this time. 

UINavigationController Custom Animations In iOS 7

Prior to iOS 7, implementing custom transitioning animations from a UINavigationController's push and pop methods required quite a bit of hackery. Early on in my own development efforts I made an attempt to override the standard animation transitions in my own UINavigationController subclass, but ultimately had to throw them onto the backburner; forever enclosed in comments. 

My current sprint, however, has included a story that forced me to go back and revisit my painful experiences. I can't expect my app to stand out from the others using the regular ol' transitions packaged by iOS. Fortuitously I managed to stumble upon these two excellent primers on iOS 7's new offerings:

One Man SCRUM

My first job as a freshly minted computer engineer was working as a real-time embedded developer with a defense contractor. When I was there everything lived and died by The Master Schedule - put together by some poor systems engineer who worked on it for hours. The venerable schedule was so detailed I wonder what percentage of time was used to simply develop the thing compared to the time to actually implement the project. 

But the schedule very much dictated a rigid waterfall approach to development. On one of my solo projects I proposed to the program manager that I would be implementing the software using an iterative approach called SCRUM. He looked at me as if I suddenly decided to start speaking Japanese. 

Suffice to say there really wasn't any drive to go beyond a waterfall approach. But I knew there were other ways to develop software and I wanted to try them.

Unfamiliar Territory

One of the more interesting aspects of developing something of my own is that I'm not just responsible for the coding now. I am also responsible for, among other things, the design of the UI elements in the app.

At work the product I develop is mature enough that all the UI design cues have already been decided on and implemented. So if I need to create a new control, there are plenty of examples that show me what it should probably look like in order to fit in. 

Not having anything to draw on for my own work is a considerable challenge for me. I am a fairly creative person to begin with. I used to draw comic book superheroes for years while in school. I designed several web pages with their own graphics and Javascript animations. 

But the world of iOS apps is super competitive to the point that how an app's icon looks like amongst its App Store competitors can make or break it. A simple Google search on how to get your app noticed yields dozens upon dozens of articles talking primarily about "discoverability." 

When the analytics provider Distimo released new data about apps in December, it rightly concluded that the exploding growth in the marketplace makes it more difficult for new developers to have their work discovered. Last July, the new Apptrace tool found that 400,000 of the then-650,000 iOS apps were “zombies” that had not been downloaded even once. (devsbuild.it)