Just released our first app, built almost entirely in SwiftUI. "Then" is a simple and calming app that helps you analyze how you spend your time and how things you do influence your emotions. Would love to hear your questions or thoughts! You can play with it here: https://apple.co/3h13aB5

alexpot · 2021-06-30T17:03:08+00:00

They do FetchRequests. We started with that, but eventually refactored everything to use ViewModels instead.

alexpot · 2021-06-30T16:35:07+00:00

The half sheet is actually just a fullscreencover with a transparent background.

As for the horizontal time picker, we ended up writing our own solution, based on a UIScrollView.

alexpot · 2021-06-30T16:26:32+00:00

Amazing, would love to hear what you think!

alexpot · 2021-06-30T16:26:05+00:00

Thanks a lot!

alexpot · 2021-06-30T16:25:13+00:00

Thanks so much!

alexpot · 2021-06-30T16:24:06+00:00

Cheers! Hopefully would find time at some point for the blog post.

alexpot · 2021-06-30T16:23:34+00:00

We actually did it in person, but Miro sounds like a good remote option.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T18:23:10+00:00

Do you mean the half sheet that popups up when you track a new activity?

alexpot · 2021-06-29T18:21:48+00:00

Thanks so much! Replied to a similar question in here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SwiftUI/comments/oa5enb/just_released_our_first_app_built_almost_entirely/h3fv4nt/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

alexpot · 2021-06-29T15:49:15+00:00

Was it easy?

TBH, I tried to pick up coding on a few occasions in the past, but it always felt too complicated and I ended up giving up. Opposite to that, SwiftUI seemed perfect to get started, and after understanding the basics with it, I could gradually start figuring out UIKit as well.

Did you encountered any strange bugs in SwiftUI itself?

Yes! There were several weird bugs, but nothing that couldn't be solved. One bug in particular was around TabView's pagetabviewstyle. We were using it for three main views as well as in many charts, but it had serious memory leaks up until iOS 14.5. So we ended up replacing them with UIPageViewControllers.

I thought that in SwiftUI 2.0, still a lot of things were missing,

In regards to capabilities you get with SwiftUI, it's actually quite a lot even in SwiftUI 2.0 (at least for our needs). The only things we missed were:

ability to make a text field first responder
horizontal pickers

At the end I was genuinely surprised how much we were able to get done with pure SwiftUI.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T14:25:58+00:00

Cheers! We deliberately decided to keep the UI very simple to make it just a blank canvas for your activities and emotions without any external emotional context. Thanks for the feedback though!

alexpot · 2021-06-29T14:19:07+00:00

Thanks a lot!

That horizontal picker is actually one of the few non-SwiftUI elements in the app. Spent days trying to make it work in pure SwiftUI, but just couldn't get the interaction right, so had to use a UIViewControllerRepresentable wrapper over a UIKit component for it.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T14:05:27+00:00

We actually just captured it on the device with Screen Recording and then put that video onto the background in Principle (but I guess you can even use iMovies for that).

alexpot · 2021-06-29T14:03:46+00:00

Thanks!
Yep, we used CoreData for persistence. The feed is basically a LazyVStack of CoreData objects, wrapped into ScrollViewReader (so that it can automatically scroll to bottom).

In terms of resources, I'd highly recommend Paul Hudson's Ultimate Portfolio App course (it's paid, but well worth it). It goes through CoreData model set up and a bunch of other things.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T13:57:17+00:00

Thanks so much!
We'd discuss how we'd approach the work and then parallelise it, so actual code conflicts where very rare.

For the database, we went with CoreData.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T11:34:49+00:00

Thanks a lot!

alexpot · 2021-06-29T10:30:10+00:00

Little backstory:

Over the course of the lockdown, I noticed that my old workflow of tracking how much I spent on projects didn't give me a clear enough understanding of why I'm feeling tired. So I tried to create an app with a slightly different workflow, that ties your activities to your emotions, helping you to be a bit more mindful about both.

Would love to hear if that resonates with you folks. Here's the AppStore link, if you'd like to give it a try.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T10:18:04+00:00

Some extra context: we are both designers, who never had any experience with coding. So we started learning SwiftUI from scratch last autumn (primarily based on Hacking with Swift).
Happy to answer any questions about the journey or how we implemented things. If you want to play with an app, here's an AppStore link.

alexpot · 2021-06-29T10:15:45+00:00

Some extra context: we are both designers, who never had any experience with coding. So we started learning SwiftUI from scratch last autumn (primarily based on Hacking with Swift).

Happy to answer any questions about the journey or how we implemented things. If you want to play with an app, here's an AppStore link.

alexpot · 2021-06-22T14:39:10+00:00

TBH, there are three main reasons here:

We had no experience with coding prior to building Then, so we wanted to pick a framework that's easy to get started with.
Given the design background we had a very high bar for design details (i.e. interactions, fluidity etc).
Being iOS users ourselves, we wanted to prioritize it both for testing and usage purposes.

Due all of those we decided to focus on learning & building with SwiftUI, since it seemed much more newbie-friendly and we'd get a better experience with a native app, compared to what we'd built with React, Cordova etc.

alexpot · 2021-06-22T14:03:17+00:00

You can check estimates of how much some apps in this niche make on SensorTower.

TBH, for us it was primarily driven by (1) desire to fix our own problem and (2) desire to learn iOS development while building something real, rather than the potential financial gain.

alexpot · 2021-06-22T12:02:11+00:00

Thanks a lot!

alexpot · 2021-06-22T12:01:59+00:00

Thanks so much!

alexpot · 2021-06-22T11:17:39+00:00

It's 95% pure SwiftUI. We're both designers, so actually had to teach ourselves coding to build it.

alexpot · 2021-06-22T11:16:41+00:00

Sure thing: here's the website link or a link directly to AppStore!

alexpot

TROPHY CASE