I’ve been writing iOS software since 2014 when I joined Cabulous (which later rebranded to Flywheel) as their first in house iOS developer. I took this job without really knowing what I was doing. I had done a little bit of work with Objective-C in college (mostly just reading the Hillegass book), but that was before iOS had been released and before people were writing apps. Much of my experience before that was in C, C++, and even JavaScript.
So I joined Flywheel, and was shipped to the east coast because we had a contract with the East Coast Pivitol labs and I learned from them how to build out a test driven iOS experience using Cedar. The previous version of Cabulous had been increadibly buggy and was written in a cross platform library that was hard to use and hard to debug. The choice was made that reliability and speed were more important so we were going native.
So I learned from people who were smarter than me and more familiar than I was with the platform and the technology. I had a bunch of GREAT instructors to learn. I learned the basics of creating table views, I learned about how Obj-C managed memory and ARC (be glad that you don’t really need to know too much about this if you pick it up today).
But Flywheel had a problem, we weren’t expanding fast enough. This would eventually lead to the retirement of the app I was working on after I left, and it was removed from the App Store. I left to join RelateIQ where I learned even more from some also impressive engineers. I went from a pretty junior iOS developer to a tech lead on projects. It was a blast. We built one of the best email clients on iPhone I’ve seen, and it was tied to your RelateIQ data, or really all your contacts with context. It was awesome.
When we got bought by Salesforce, we integrated the Salesforce Objects into our app. We even had a couple fo screeens that were written in React Native, championed by a long time Salesforce Developer and that was also very compelling. As time went on though, the project became stagnent. Salesforce invested in its other native apps and let the product we were on get retired. Salesforce Inbox no longer as a real development team and if it is out there, it isn’t at the same level it was before.
I left Salesforce and took several years away from iOS. I wanted to try something new and a couple of friends propositioned me to try to work with them in a different capacity, using most of my secondary skills, and less of my programming side. During this time I tried to do a couple of side iOS projects, but honestly, I was just too commited to the project I was working on, and it required most of my engineering mind.
During my sabatical from iOS a couple of things happened, firstly, SwiftUI came out. This is Apple’s answer to react. I still have much to undestand about the details here and my next app will be written in this technology if at all possible. Secondly, Swift vastly surpassed Objective-C as the default langauge that iOS apps are written in. All tutorial sites switched pretty immediately and Apple seems to be pushing people hard to move in that direction. While some of the RelateIQ codebase was Swift, the vast majority was Obj-C.
Bottom line, I’ve been working in the field for 6+ years between Flywheel and RelateIQ and I have no app in the app store with my code. I’m sad about that and wanted to change it, so I decided to build and app and get it published. I’m taking a super agile approach of building something, getting it out there and then refining it so it is still a work in progress. Still, I’d like to announce that the Acroyoga Field Guide is now relaeased in the App Store.
Many more featuers are coming down the line and should be released shortly. Thanks!