Having decided that simply making a living on the App Store by whatever means necessary is not enough, I am embarking on an adventure into games, both figuratively and literally.
My modest aim is to create something as beloved and impactful as The Secret of Monkey Island.
By myself.
Having just developed a plist-based design framework that works in Interface Builder, I’m more interested than ever in using xibs and storyboards to design my views.
I also like using AutoLayout. There are significant advantages when it comes to things like labels that make it so much easier to deal with than manually setting frames everywhere in code. Things like Dynamic Type, accessibility, and localisation all become easier and there’s less room for error.
There are some things that do become more complicated with AutoLayout (mostly transforms) but there are well established workarounds for most of these.
I was recently designing a new app that involved using MapKit and I wanted to use AutoLayout to design a subclsss of MKAnnotationView but this isn’t entirely straightforward.
I had a lot of trouble getting my Nintendo Switch to connect to the internet while staying at our otherwise lovely villa here in Bali. While trying to join a network it would give the “registration is required to use this network” warning, then launch the browser to try to show me the registration page.
Except instead of a registration page, it would just show the default conntest.nintendowifi.net page. This means that no registration was actually required and the Switch was online but, because it hadn’t passed registration, it thought it wasn’t and no services would work.
I have an appearance manager that reads styles from a plist file and applies then throughout the app through the use of the appearance proxy and through notifications to various custom subclasses of the standard UIKit views and controls.
This works great and allows for of a lot of easy features like different coloured themes or dark modes. The major downside right now is that none of the changes to the plist are reflected in Storyboards or Xib files.
Working with UICollectionView and the layout to layout transition makes it very easy to animate between two flow layouts with minimal work.
I’ve had a copy of Loomis’ Fun with a Pencil kicking about various hard drives for about 10 years now. It’s served as a handy reference during that time but at the start of this year I committed to completing it fully.
A man is in an unknown part of the world and has to rely on strangers for help. He takes them at face value. He doesn’t have the energy to be suspicious. He wants to deliver his package. They point him towards a world that is like our world but is not our world.
Nirvana’s Nevermind was one of the first two records that introduced me to the alternative scene (the other being The Offspring’s Smash) and almost overnight I started wearing Doc Martens and leather jackets and formed the first of my many bands.
Late last year I watched An Evening with Ray Bradbury. He was giving the keynote at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in 2001 and, during his speech, he offers some interesting advice to aspiring novelists: