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I started making iOS apps soon after Xcode 6 beta was released, one of the main attractions for me was the new programming language, Swift . I really enjoyed coding in Swift but making an iOS app is more than just about coding in Swift, there's a whole bunch of additional stuff that you need to know. In this blog post, I am just going to share a list of online resources that helped me learn how to make iOS apps and eventually get to creating my first iOS app My Day Todo s. Ok, I will try to get through the resources that I found in Chronological order, In the beginning... Swift was new and Xcode 6 was still in beta, so there weren't a whole lot of useful resources out there, some of my SO questions were down-voted and closed. In fact for one of my questions someone on SO who possibly down-voted my question commented that, "this is not a real question, it is so simple to do this in Objective-C"... I am pretty sure my question was very clear about me working with ...

To start with part 3, I think it's best we have a recap of all the events leading up to this. So here we go, Previously in parts 1 and 2... I had a great life, a loving girlfriend, a job I liked etc etc and little did I know that it was the calm before the storm. One evening I had a really bad accident while I was out on my usual run, what happened was while crossing the road, I was hit by a car and left for dead on the street.  I suffered a few injuries as a result of the accident, one of which was a Traumatic Brain injury and I lost a lot of what was very dear to me. I lost my girlfriend(breakup), my ability to walk(at the time), my memory wasn't as good anymore and a number of other things. A few months after my accident, I started building my first mobile(iOS) app which would serve as a tool to help me in my daily life. That was a quick recap of the events, if you want to know more, you can have a read of part 1  and part 2 . Hmm, where do we begin? The app that I ...

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been quite busy preparing for the holiday season i.e. I am hoping to generate some more sales for my iOS app, My Day Todos . I have been trying to update the app to add certain features and to streamline certain things to make it a more compelling case for people to buy it. In this post, I will briefly talk about the last two(1.6 & 1.7) updates for My Day Todos and a more detailed description of My Day Todos Lite i.e. the free version of the app. I will talk about some of the challenges to releasing it and my decisions to prepare a free version without loosing the essence of the actual app. All right, let's start with the updates, The 1.6 update: Weather info I always thought that the app would be awesome if it woke you up, told you what you are doing for the day followed by what the weather is like where you are. I initially added this feature to the first release but I decided to remove it as it wasn't fully tested at the time an...

This is something that I had been meaning to add to  Html5StarterAppWithSwift for a long time and I was finally able to achieve that a couple of weeks ago. Background One of my past jobs involved me working on a web app that did all sorts of data visualisation i.e. drawing charts using Javascript charting libraries. Consequently, I have also applied my data visualisation knowledge to one of my personal projects i.e.  PTAapp  which should give an indication of how data visualisation fits into my background. Now let's talk about some of the tech that I used to build charts. In my past job we used Google Charts  to draw charts, which at the time at least required an internet connection to work. As I talk about in my previous post  I used morris.js  to avoid the issue of internet connectivity. Now that I am involved in making iOS apps and given my background it seemed natural for me to apply my charting knowledge to making iOS apps...and that is ...

In this post, I will continue from where we left in Part 1 of this series.  In part 2, I will talk more about the front-end side of things. Ahh, I have a background in web development, hence I call this front-end, but that's not the most accurate thing to say in these modern times. So the right way to say this is, I will talk about the Ionic app in this Github repository(IonicAppWithRestBackend) in more details in this post. So what did we do in part 1? In part 1, we got to the point of running our backend on the web server that ships with Django . To refresh your memory, this is how we got the backend server running, Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/cptdanko/IonicAppWithRestBackend Navigate to the backend project directory cd IonicAppWithRestBackend/backend/python_django/restBackend/ Note: if you are using Windows, you may want to change "/" to "\" in the above command. Once there you can run the backend server with the follow...

In this post, I will be talking about my latest Github repository(repo);  IonicAppWithRestBackend  and delve into details about what it is and the problem it aims to solve. Introduction The idea of this repo is to provide code samples for both the backend and front-end for an Ionic app that communicates with a REST ful backend. The aim is to bring many disparate aspects of building a solution like this(hybrid app that talks to a REST backend) and to be able to see most of them as one complete solution. Also, a solution such as this ensures you can test your Ionic app locally during development. Still not clear? read on to find out what I mean. Note: Once I started writing this post, I realised that it would be a really long blog post, so I decided to split it into individual parts in hopes that it's an easier read. In part 1, I will be talking about what the backend solution is and how to get it running. Motivation In 2014, I started working on a project with someon...

So it's been over a month since I released My Day Todos on the App Store (iOS) and I have been releasing updates for it ever since. So one of the things that I would share in this post is my realisation that having a successful app is not just about writing code, it's so much more than that. Now before anyone reading this says "DUH...", well yes it is a pretty obvious thing but it's the first time I have gotten first-hand experience. So let me share some of the things that have kept me busy post app release... Marketing or just getting the word out in general... My academic background mostly involves Computer Science research and all my past jobs involved me writing code for the most part(except that one job where I was consultant). Given my background I have little or no knowledge about marketing or for that matter how to make something stand out in a highly competitive market. Sure! I can add a unique feature to my app but then how do I let people know abou...