I just released a new app to the App store, and is now available to download. It's a Park's Three Step app, similar to the one I have on the EyeDock website.
It's been a long time since I made a new iPhone app. I wrote the original EyeDock and CLCalcs on a very early version of iOS (it was iPhone OS at the time). Back then, iPhones only had 3.5" screens and iPads didn't exist.
I've opened up XCode and modified those apps a few times since their inception, but mostly just to fix things. It usually worked like this:
- new version of iOS comes out
- Crap, my app doesn't work!
- Hurriedly, with a thin sheen of sweat on my brow, try to fix app before I got too many complaints
My apps were pretty much like an old watch: I fixed them when they broke, but I broke out in a cold swear whenever I opened them up and looked at the insides.
I decided a few months ago I really need to make some changes to the EyeDock app. I don't like the way it downloads its data, it's not optimized for the 4" iPhone screens, and I really need an iPad version.
I'd stayed tuned to the developments in iOS and knew that things were evolving rapidly. In light of Apples has added or changed their APIs, in conjunction with the major changes I wanted to make to my old apps, I thought it might be best to relearn the ropes. What better way to do this than to make a new app from scratch.
In conclusion, I bring you the Parks Three Step app. It's my first universal app (it works on both the iPhone and iPad). I too advantage of many of the new things that have come along with the last 3-4 versions of iOS, including parallax, blocks, autolayout, and ARC. These things may not mean a lot to my non-iOS-developer readers, but this essentially means I'm caught up on the modern way of doing things.
Now time to rebuild that watch.