Whew! Well both Bargain and Pressured are now on the App Store and ready for the Duo.
This is definitely the nicest version of Bargain ever and I’m very pleased with it, simple as it is.
Pressured
I’ve removed the dark blue header from the vehicle list as it had caused me some issues right from the start, but when opening the Duo to full size, it looked very awkward so it’s gone and won’t be coming back! It’s looking good.
The other change I’ve made from the original is that the “inflation sound” when editing an entry has been removed for now, though it will return in shortened form. This was because I noticed that during development I was getting warnings that it could cause interface stuttering and other effects and I don’t want that.
It was a lot of work to get this loaded to the App Store due to all those screenshots. Pressured is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. This meant, in Light appearance, one shot for a standard iPhone and four shots for the Duo. Then all of those again in each of the four other languages. Then a dark appearance shot for each in each language! I think I was going cross-eyed by the end of it.
I had hoped to have Pink Plaques ready for the Duo on the 23rd too, but it was too much in the time available given the practical work required to upload Pressured.
Pink Plaques was released in 2012 (14 years ago!) and was written using Apple’s tools of the time – a lot has changed since 2012. I decided to rewrite it completely in SwiftUI as I’ve done with Bargain. It’s a notably more complex app, but even so it’s about 90% there after about two weeks or so.
Currently you can see all the tours, add and save your own tour headers, view a list of a tour’s plaques and view a plaque’s detail page. The map looks good with almost all functionality available, though it does dump every plaque on the map on first view which is way too many as it has no progressive disclosure yet.
One great new feature is that tapping on any plaque now shows the walking route to it and an accurate time to get there – courtesy of Apple’s maps. I’m hoping that this new version will be available in a few weeks.
I’ve done nothing to Identicode yet. It’s a curious one as it was written to look specifically idiosyncratic with it’s big coloured buttons and the like.
I want to rewrite this in SwiftUI too but it will be quite a different approach to the others I feel, to modernise it without losing it’s quirkiness. I’ll see when I get there.
I withdrew 1000 Words about a year after introducing it as when I rebuilt it for the next macOS it stopped working! I removed it from the store but thought that perhaps I may be able to rewrite it in SwiftUI and re-release it.
I have a version up and running: it has preferences, the editing behaves pretty well but the window presentation is a bit odd and I’ve not tried saving any files yet. It’s running anyway and I would definitely like to bring it back.
Dicewords is a total wildcard! It was tied to the specific screen sizes at the time I wrote it and when Apple started releasing all these new phones and iPads I could not support it and withdrew it from the store. I’m considering seeing if the use of AI might allow me to create a device independent version that would be feasible to re-release. We shall see.
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After bringing Pink Plaques and Identicode up to date I’ll be returning to the app was working on before the Duo popped up and distracted me!