Side Project Spotlight

After we recorded this week's podcast, we did decide on our next side project and it's not what you might expect. It has to do with pickles. Stay tuned for info about that next time! This week, we delve into the side project "failure" bin to talk about overcoming the many challenges to completing side projects and how even when we move on from one, it was still worth doing. ## Topics Discussed: -...

We have another special guest this week! Sean Najera , Senior Mobile Developer at Nuuly, joins the Pod to talk about his experiences using Flutter before discussing his new SwiftUI Navigator library that fixes a big missing feature in Apple's framework. There is also some love for C#, a look at the waves of Android development over the years, the evolution of languages like Dart and Swift, and new...

With all of us getting busy with work, we are using this opportunity to experiment with the podcast format and bring a spotlight to other developers in the community. Our first guest to the POD is Arpit Mathur, creator of GroceryTimer.app. This app was our Not a Sponsor last time and since it was recently released, we thought it would be fun to discuss the how's and why's of its creation. Arpit is...

Ok, we are really spinning our wheels now getting a new app idea pinned down, but the upshot is there are a lot of interesting subjects touched upon this week, including the "confirmation" of RealityOS, how people occlusion works in ARKit, a tangent about the history of Web API technologies, and much more. Plus, our Not a Sponsor this week could help you keep your food from spoiling! ## Topics Dis...

Continuing our incremental progress exploring the AR app space, this week, Aaron shows off our first baby steps with a working prototype! Steve discusses his month long side project making movies, which prompts a discussion of how AR could be used in filmmaking. Then, Kotaro and Steve go on a tangent exploring nightmare AR/VR dystopia possibilities before getting back on track with this week's "No...

We decided that we want to work on an AR app, but we still can't figure out what to build. The space is still very new, hardware from Apple doesn't exist yet, and life really got in our way last sprint, so we didn't get much prototype exploration done. This week, we continue our search for an AR app idea, perhaps come up with a germ of an idea by the end, and in the middle, Kotaro expounds on game...

After a brief retrospective about our last app, Kanji Love, and a shout out to the recently departed Release Notes podcast, the team starts a discussion about our next project, which looks like it'll be focused on Augmented Reality. First, we ask ourselves, what is the relationship between AR, VR, and the "Metaverse" concept? Then we read the tea leaves of Apple's APIs to make an educated guess ab...

It's release day! Kanji Love is in the App Store! In this season finale episode, we discuss the story behind the app's name as well as some of the final bug fixes and tasks we had to complete. Then, you can listen in to the moment we made the app live in the store! Finally, we discuss some ideas for next season. Don't worry, Side Project Spotlight WILL RETURN! - Download the app! - Check out the w...

We are in the endgame now! Kotaro has refined the UI while Aaron has updated our Core Data stack and Steve got Notifications working! All the pieces are together and we basically have a feature complete 1.0 app! Now we are entering into the final stress test, debugging, and polishing stages. In this episode we discuss the promise and current limitations of Xcode Cloud, provide an overview of the A...

Sprint 4 is over and we are entering the home stretch. Kotaro got the swipe mechanic working, Aaron got so much done, he started adding features, and Steve ran into issues trying to build a Notifications UI. The trio discuss Git branches and merging strategies and then spend the bulk of the episode diving into SwiftUI architecture in general and specifically regarding the app. Finally, in a segmen...

Sprint 3 is over and Kotaro has made progress on the UI with a complete app skeleton now linked together, but is still working on the core swipe animation. Meanwhile, Steve found notifications a little harder to setup in a SwiftUI environment than expected, but got the basic plumbing working when he wasn't editing the podcast. Aaron is the Sprint MVP as he updated the data managers so that Kanji c...

Sprint 2 is done and we have data! In this episode, we check-in on our goals for the sprint and discuss what got done, what didn't, and some interesting issues that came up along the way. Now that we have Kanji data in the Core Data database, we can shift focus to building the UI for the app and notifications for next time.  ## Follow-up from last sprint:   - Wireframes and prototyp...

Our first sprint encountered some hiccups and we are off to a slow start, but progress has been made!  This week, we have some follow-up about changes to our initial App Store Connect environment, describe how we setup the podcast, and spend the majority of the meeting talking about data sources, structures, and UI.  Topics include: - Switching to an App Store Connect Team account for de...

For our inaugural season, we (Kotaro, Steve, and Aaron) are building a watchOS Kanji flashcard app and documenting our journey. This week, we tackle the initial project infrastructure setup and talk next steps. Topics include: - Github project setup and .gitignore - App Store Connect Users - New up a Xcode Project from a template - What is this app all about? - Initial wireframes - Kanji database...