About the app
Now that I’ve been working on my app for a few days, it’s time to tell you something about it. One of the sources I’ve used for Oorlogsbrieven, the WWII book I’m working on with Lisanne, are my grandfather’s memoirs. I was amazed by the sheer amount of memories and stories he was able to recall when he wrote this, while he was in his seventies. I, on the other hand, am in my early thirties and already have trouble remembering what I did last year or when I moved to a new apartment or started a new job.
In the last few days of 2014, I decided to write down very briefly what happened each year in my life, about one paragraph per year. Just some factual things: where did I live? Did I move? What was going on at school or work? What was my relationship status? Did I meet new friends, start new hobbies, join new clubs? What big things happened? I am simply using a text file on my computer, but thought it would be a nice, small idea for a nice, small app.
The app will be called miniMoires: like memoirs, but mini (and with the extra ‘e’ added for Dutch spelling).
Second steps
At the end of my previous blog post about Swift, I mentioned trying to figure out Core Data. It seemed like a good idea, since the app requires some data to be saved (a memoir entry for each year). After looking at Core Data for a bit, I found it quite confusing, and decided to take it a bit easier: trying to save data to text files might be a better idea for now.
After having succeeded at saving data to text files (yay!) I decided to take my Playground to a Project. That requires some extra knowledge besides just Swift: suddenly you need to deal with the connection between user interface and functionality, and with completely new concepts such as storyboards. The video at the end of this post introduces some of these concepts, but still I’m struggling with tying everything together.
And so, I find myself oscillating between small victories and moments of utter bewilderment and helplessness. Fortunately, every mini-crisis has so far been resolved and I am loving all the little thrills of ‘hey, I know this!’
A bit of relaxing
After a day of writing code and reading about Swift, it’s time to lie on the couch and watch something relaxing. Since I wasn’t yet tired of Swift last night, I found this 90-minute live Swift coding session by Code School. Having only dealt with Swift itself and no UI things yet, I found it quite enlightening, but also a bit confusing. Delegates, ViewControllers, storyboards… I still have to dive a bit deeper into that. The resources that go with this video can be found here.