While I’ve been a macOS user for many years, I’ve never really got into using the native developer tools, and instead have relied on JavaScript for anything interactive, and C for command line apps and such – recently, I’ve been learning Go as I wanted to have something quick to write in like JS, but performant like C, and while I’ve been finding Go really good, it doesn’t give me a great route to a UI; Wails shows great promise, and I’m eagerly awaiting the final release of v3 after doing some testing with DigiChain wrapped as a native app using Wails (I’m still on the fence here, while I don’t particularly enjoy writing in Rust, Tauri feels much more mature at the moment than Wails).
But to bring this post back on track, I stumbled across the hackingwithswift website, which got me looking at using Swift, and in particular SwiftUI – which as a frontend developer for many years, feels a lot like React in how things are structured.
So, after a few weeks of the 100 days of SwiftUI tutorials and several demo/learning apps with Swift Playgrounds, I felt ready to attempt to create a small app – my wife had an idea for something that seemed relatively simple to make and with a small focused usecase, a “spinner” app, where the user enters their books into a library, and the app places the books onto a spinning wheel to pick a book at random to read next.
What started out fairly simple, quickly crept in scope, adding filters for challenges, like authors first or last name starting with a specific letter, or genre and read length to only showing the next unread book in a series to prevent the spinner giving out of order book choices.
I then hooked this into the openlibrary API to support ISBN book barcode scanning to attempt to autofill the book details.
There were a couple of rounds of changes to meet Apple’s expectations, but from 17th July to today, I went from initial idea to published on the app store in 14 days.
Check the app out on the Apple iOS App Store 🙂
brianbar.net 