In preparation for iOS 13, tvOS 13, & macOS 10.15, I’ve released Restructure 2.0.0. The major change for this release is the move to Swift Package Manager for distribution. All of the Apple ecosystem is moving to SPM, and so goes Restructure. No more submodules!
This release also adds some additions mentioned in the WWDC 2019 session Optimizing Storage in Your App. Journal and vacuum modes can now be modified to better manage your storage usage. Secure deletion has is also configurable.
My Score Card app had been neglected for a while, and since I was already in the mode of updating iOS apps, I gave this app the same curtesy. As with my other projects, I’ve updated the app to Swift 5 and Restructure. Along with that, the app should look better on modern iOS devices.
As an added bonus, I added a custom keyboard, since the stock keyboards on iOS never presented the exact right combination of keys to make score entry easy. Along with that keyboard, the iPad version gets simple physical keyboard support for quickly editing scores.
I also moved the app from free to $0.99. This is more of an experiment, since the app already has a good amount of users and there is zero advertising done to it.
Check it out on the App Store.
I’ve been working on other iOS projects for a while. Recently, I’ve been thinking about Approximate Speed, the simplistic timing app I wrote years ago and never touched again. Two days ago, I receive an email from the App Store:
Oops.
I hadn’t updated it in so long that it doesn’t even function with modern iOS devices. It’s been over 3 years. I’ve spent the last two days bringing up to speed, which was a lot harder than I first thought. Among other issues:
All of that aside, the new version is available. There’s nothing really new, just a code migration a little bit of polish as UIKit has changed a bit in 3 years.
It’s available now, on the App Store.
In the process of writing Formula Control, I decided it was time to rethink my SQLite wrapper, Structure. I started writing my original library when Swift 1.0 was announced. It was migrated through the big language transitions of Swift and was starting to show its age. The framework was also my first attempt at writing a Swift library and a SQLite wrapper, so I didn’t know what I needed and which features were overkill.
And so Restructure was born. The new framework simplifies the API I had created before, hiding relationships between statement and database, and removing internal queueing that was never necessary. It adopts many more datatypes, and makes it easier to work with more complex datatypes like arrays and dates.
Along with a clean up, Restructure also adopts more modern features of Swift. Statements are also Sequences, so now results can be iterated, mapped, reduced, or anything else a Sequence can do. Statements are Encodable and Rows are Decodable, making transitions between database and data structure seamless.
Check it out on GitHub. There are examples and unit tests to learn form.
My friends and I have been playing Formula Dé for quite a while. We play it so much, we have a yearly league. We even attempted to bring the game in to the infield of the Indy 500. It was so hot, we never played, but attempting to playing in the IMS infield required some ingenuity. This resulted in me obsession for years over an app to control your Formula Dé drivers without having to worry about the multi-piece control panel.
Hence, Formula Control was born. It’s definitely over engineered, but that’s how I like to do things. Beyond the simple things, like controlling all of the aspects of the game and ensuring every rule is considered, it also uses new parts of the iOS operating system that I had never considered before. The app works well on the iPad, utilizing keyboard shortcuts and Split View. It also has been audited for accessibility features like VoiceOver and Inverted Colors. I even learned SpriteKit to make a subtle flag waving animation.
Check it out on the App Store, and make sure to review it if you happen to be on of the few people to still play this board game.