First Public Demo

Had my first public demo of my Alpha level app last night. And I now have a timeframe. I will strive to make the app finished and done by Late October. The app is a simple idea, but I keep learning more and more things to make it valuable.

I am creating a App that will allow someone to keep track of the cards that they are sending people. While more and more people are using electronic cards, or no cards at all, just think of all the Hallmark stores that are closing, I still find it a wonderful surprise when I open the mail box, and find a nice greeting card in it. There are tons of holidays and events that warrant a card, and keeping track of which ones you sent to which person, can be a time consuming issue.

My new app will hopefully make it much easier to keep track of who you sent what card to. Lots more to come.

Making Progress

As of last night, the new Alpha code, allows the users to create new records, and new related records, without crashing!! Now that’s progress. Next I need to create the delete function on the main screen, and add in the correct displaying of created related records. This requires a new screen to display the chosen Event information, that shouldn’t be hard, and will allow me to validate that the image store function is working correctly. The good news is that testers are finding some display issues between running the app on different types of screens. Evidently on the iPhone X the auto sizing of the fonts is not behaving as expected… hope to get some time to work on these next weekend!

Progress!!

Debugging Core Data

One of the reasons I’ve toyed with the new app for so long (the idea is about 5 years old), has been that I am struggling to learn Core Data. Not only that, but I’ve been dealing with a ton of day job activities, etc. So I am finally getting this app started. The basic idea behind the application is a header->detail line database challenge, back when I did DB programming this would have been called an invoice problem. In this case, we have from 0 to infinite headers (each one a unique record), and each header can have from 0 to infinite detailed records.

In Core data you would define your entities with Header having a one to many relationship to Detail. And that relationship would be optional, since you could have 0 detailed entities. Right now the application does a good job of showing you a list of the headers, and allowing you to add new headers. My early builds (the ones were I didn’t define the detail records) even let you go back and do a detail view of the headers.

Now when I go to the header views, it crashes while trying to give you a UITableView of the detailed records. Obviously I am not handling Detail records correctly. I’ve been told that these records are an NSSet and should be converted to an Array for UITableView handling. So my current guess is I am not handling an empty Array correctly. I am guessing I need to set it to NIL in the ViewController and then assign data to it in the TableView functions. (I will try that this weekend).

My second crash is when I try to allow a user to delete the Header records. I was able to do this originally, so somehow in my refactoring of the app to add the detail records, I must have screwed something up. I hope to fix this one quickly.

Now the reason I called this post “Debugging Core Data” is because the crashes don’t seem to provide me with a lot of insights, in to what the crash really is, but I find if I try and explain a programming problem I have to someone, I tend to work it out. Let’s hope this worked!

A new alpha

Refactoring an app and a database at the same time, can lead to some interesting bugs. So today, I restructured my app. The good news is that the flow is more in line where I think I want it. THe bad news is, while I have enabled swipe to delete, it crashes the Alpha (after it deletes). I also have a new Add and View Recipient screen. The Add Event screen, while there, has some issues with getting all the data, and right now, it still doesn’t save the event. (That will happen, I hope next weekend).

Given all the other things I have to do tomorrrow, I won’t have another TestFlight until next week, but I am posting this one. I hope my testers provide “some” feedback.

Rehearsal And Programming

I am currently rehearsing for my favorite Light Opera – Ruddigore by Gilbert & Sullivan. Rehearsing is a lot of hard work. You have to learn the “rules” (blocking, lyrics, dancing, notes, and dialog). You have to practice these rules over and over until you can do them without thinking. And then magic happens, and you start performing. Performing allows you to interpret the rules and put a piece of your heart and soul into the final product – the Show! The becomes the experience that others get to have, based on all your hard work.

At the same time, I am working on building a new iOS application. In order to do this one right, I am having to learn new things (core date, swift 4, dealing with new APIs like the camera, TestFlight for testing, etc.) Once I have this down, I will improve the design, making it much more engaging – even if now it is a very rudimentary experience. Magic happens once I can get it all working without thinking. I hope the outcome of this app, will be just as engaging as Ruddigore!

What are those things that you love doing, that take a lot of hard work, and that you can never truly master?

Alpha App to do list

For my testers.. thank you for your testing….

As of now, I don’t have a real name for the app, nor any real artwork.. but I do have a list of things to do:

Fixed delete bug

Fixed address display bug.

Note right now you can only “save” the contact information.

I am working on the next part which will do the following:

1) Save the pictures (front and back)

2) create a UITableView of the prior cards, which will include Date, Event, Pictures

3) allow for a delete function on the main view by doing a slide over to delete

4) on the detailed screeen (#2) will add two buttons – add new Card, and Edit Contact information

5) Ultimately will want to create a picker to allow you to pick the contact from your existing Apple Contacts

Alpha testing of New App underway

So, I have begun Alpha testing of my new app with a small group of friends.  I have setup TestFlight in order to do this, and while there are a lot of builds going on, sometimes multiple in one day, I am excited to be doing this.  Right now the app is NO WHERE feature complete… I know I want to provide the ability to pull things from Apple’s contact list – as one example.  It is great to be getting any feedback from people other than myself.  Let’s hope I can get this app to market by Summer.  I’ll try and provide more insights as I start designing the art work… but that’s a long way off.  If you are interested in getting the test builds.. let me know.  Thanks!

Productive Day Part Two

Well, it’s not perfect, but I added core data to my app that started yesterday.  I have a simple table behind a tracking app. Now, I want to add a sub-table underneath that tracking, so things will get more interesting as I move forward.  I have run into a bit of a snag, however, when I delete a record, it shows that it is deleted.  But when I go back into the app, the record is magically back!?!?!  Must be some kind of cacheing issue, so will have to wait for another productive weekend before I figure that one out.

The UI is still very very basic, and not yet a worth while view, but to test out all the concepts of what I am doing, it’s good enough.  More to come.  I hope that I can release this app sometime this summer.  We shall See!

Productive day

Today was pretty productive. I’ve been toying with a new app, and today I got an early alpha of it done, and posted on TestFlight for a few friends to test. It is no where near done, but learned how to submit to TestFlight for testing. Very productive.

Alright Apple.. This is ludicrous

So, last week I was traveling and using a brand new 13inch MacBook Pro, with Touch Bar, and 12.9inch iPad Pro (first gen), a iPhone 7 Plus, and an Apple watch.  When I upgraded to the MacBook Pro with Touch bar I replaced all my travel cables with Apple USB-C cables, this would allow me to minimize the amount of dongles, etc.  So this trip was overseas, and I felt very happy that I had done this cable replacement to minimize the amount of adapters I needed and country specific adapters.  I had replaced the adapter on my 61W USB-C MBP Charger so that it could plug directly into local wall adapters, and I brought one 12W Adapter to I could charge my Apple Watch each day.

Imagine my surprise when I plugged my iPad Pro into the USB-C plug on the MacBook Pro (turned on, plugged into, etc. to a 220V outlet) and it would not charge!  Here I am completely in the Apple ecosystem with the latest cables and devices (ok not the latest but only 1 get back) and my iPad won’t charge.

I ended up doing a twitter help with @applesupport and getting a Genius appointment when I got back to the States.  At the Genius bar I was informed that the iPad Pro was NOT supported to charge on USB-C with the latest MacBook Pro.

WHAT THE HELL??  This is ludicrous!