Good morning 👋 This week was spent mostly working on charts. The current version of Appy Weather has quite a few, but v2 makes them an integral part of the experience. Prior to this week, Daniel Gindi’s popular iOS charts library was being used to create them. It provided a ton of functionality and customisation. That’s arguably because it’s built on a legacy UI framework (not SwiftUI). So there was something about its look and feel that didn’t feel modern, and therefore misaligned with the rest of the app’s UX. I had similar feelings when actually working on it. The codebase was massive and just identifying the relevant area of code was a challenge. Forget about the hacks involved to make the desired tweaks. So on Friday I decided to see whether I can build something myself. 30 minutes later I had. What! It was a range bar chart, similar to the one already being used on the Daily screen visualising the weather for the next seven days. I then challenged myself to go one better. Am I able to have another visual within it to indicate precipitation levels? Yes I was. To round it off, now that everything was in SwiftUI, could I get it to animate? Of course! A lot of the credit goes to SwiftUI (and its incredibly community). I have never felt so empowered when building interfaces. I would never have even considered attempting this in any other UI framework, forget about actually pulling it off. I need to take some credit too.
S03E42 – The Flash
S03E42 – The Flash
S03E42 – The Flash
Good morning 👋 This week was spent mostly working on charts. The current version of Appy Weather has quite a few, but v2 makes them an integral part of the experience. Prior to this week, Daniel Gindi’s popular iOS charts library was being used to create them. It provided a ton of functionality and customisation. That’s arguably because it’s built on a legacy UI framework (not SwiftUI). So there was something about its look and feel that didn’t feel modern, and therefore misaligned with the rest of the app’s UX. I had similar feelings when actually working on it. The codebase was massive and just identifying the relevant area of code was a challenge. Forget about the hacks involved to make the desired tweaks. So on Friday I decided to see whether I can build something myself. 30 minutes later I had. What! It was a range bar chart, similar to the one already being used on the Daily screen visualising the weather for the next seven days. I then challenged myself to go one better. Am I able to have another visual within it to indicate precipitation levels? Yes I was. To round it off, now that everything was in SwiftUI, could I get it to animate? Of course! A lot of the credit goes to SwiftUI (and its incredibly community). I have never felt so empowered when building interfaces. I would never have even considered attempting this in any other UI framework, forget about actually pulling it off. I need to take some credit too.