Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple and

00:00:06 ◼   ► the like.

00:00:07 ◼   ► I'm your host, David Smith.

00:00:08 ◼   ► I'm an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herndon, Virginia.

00:00:11 ◼   ► This is show number 134 and today is Friday, July 19th.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:18 ◼   ► All right, first I just want to start off by thanking everybody for the kind words and

00:00:22 ◼   ► encouragement after posting my, I guess, my two-year anniversary show last week.

00:00:27 ◼   ► was really nice to hear all the people who responded and talked

00:00:30 ◼   ► about how the role of developing perspective

00:00:33 ◼   ► is played in them and their career

00:00:35 ◼   ► and the apps they've shipped and things like that.

00:00:37 ◼   ► So that was kind of cool to hear.

00:00:38 ◼   ► So thank you.

00:00:39 ◼   ► I appreciate that.

00:00:40 ◼   ► And so after that, I'm just going

00:00:42 ◼   ► to dive right into my topic for today, which is about--

00:00:45 ◼   ► I guess you could call it toy projects,

00:00:48 ◼   ► like playground projects.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Everyone, I think, has different names for these.

00:00:51 ◼   ► But I think there's something that I

00:00:53 ◼   ► think is very important for people to use.

00:00:56 ◼   ► And I find myself increasingly kind of heading in this direction.

00:00:59 ◼   ► And so I kind of wanted to talk about the role they play for me

00:01:02 ◼   ► and how useful they are.

00:01:04 ◼   ► So specifically, I'm going to talk from my own experience.

00:01:07 ◼   ► This last couple of weeks, I've been working on a little toy project

00:01:11 ◼   ► because it started from a place of realizing that--

00:01:14 ◼   ► Iowa 7 especially--had a lot of new APIs,

00:01:18 ◼   ► a lot of new things that it does,

00:01:20 ◼   ► and a lot of things that it does in ways that will change how I build my apps.

00:01:25 ◼   ► And so I thought to myself, well, as I'm staring down, making updates to all my big, my main,

00:01:32 ◼   ► my significant applications, that's a bit of an intimidating thing to look at a code

00:01:35 ◼   ► base with, I don't even know, thousands of lines of code and say, OK, well, how am I

00:01:40 ◼   ► going to adapt this?

00:01:41 ◼   ► How am I going to change this?

00:01:42 ◼   ► What do I need to do to make this iOS 7 ready?

00:01:45 ◼   ► And then also, how do I make that coexist well with iOS 6?

00:01:48 ◼   ► And these kinds of questions kind of made me start to get a little intimidated.

00:01:52 ◼   ► I was like, you know what I should do?

00:01:54 ◼   ► I should pull up one of my old kind of sort of toy projects,

00:01:57 ◼   ► and I should work on that and update that for iOS 7

00:02:01 ◼   ► and see if we sort of get some experience with that.

00:02:04 ◼   ► And so what I did is I pulled up an old project of mine called

00:02:07 ◼   ► Simplegram, which is an Instagram viewing application.

00:02:10 ◼   ► And I thought to myself, well, this is a good one.

00:02:12 ◼   ► It's a very basic app in the sense

00:02:14 ◼   ► that it just displays pictures for the most part,

00:02:16 ◼   ► does a few web service calls, gets back some JSON, parses it,

00:02:18 ◼   ► displays it to the user, does some caching.

00:02:20 ◼   ► But it could really use a lot of the stuff that's

00:02:22 ◼   ► coming in iOS 7.

00:02:23 ◼   ► And obviously, I'm not going to get into the technical side of that so much as the kind

00:02:26 ◼   ► of just the high level stuff from the keynote and, you know, Apple's general thing that,

00:02:30 ◼   ► you know, you can do things like background downloading now.

00:02:32 ◼   ► And there's a variety of UI and changes and improvements that are coming in iOS 7.

00:02:36 ◼   ► And so I was like, well, let's try this.

00:02:38 ◼   ► And so I started and, you know, the next -- sort of in my spare time and sort of evenings and

00:02:43 ◼   ► things over the last week, I've been working on this.

00:02:45 ◼   ► And I've gotten it now to a point where it's a fully working iOS 7 application.

00:02:50 ◼   ► What I love is that what that does is that puts me now

00:02:52 ◼   ► in a place that I have this great little sort of example

00:02:55 ◼   ► code for myself of how to do things in iOS 7.

00:02:58 ◼   ► All the new APIs for appearance and networking,

00:03:03 ◼   ► and all the little things that are changing out

00:03:05 ◼   ► from under the app, I have a reference implementation

00:03:08 ◼   ► that is useful and meaningful, styled how I like it.

00:03:12 ◼   ► That's kind of going beyond, say, the sample code

00:03:14 ◼   ► that you get from WWDC or something like that.

00:03:17 ◼   ► Because I find that we're kind of in this weird middle ground

00:03:20 ◼   ► now, where after iOS 7 actually launches in the fall,

00:03:27 ◼   ► there'll be a lot of talk about it in terms of tutorials

00:03:29 ◼   ► and books and all kinds of things

00:03:31 ◼   ► that will appear at that point to help people kind of work

00:03:34 ◼   ► around some of the complicated edges.

00:03:37 ◼   ► But until then, you kind of run on your own for better or worse.

00:03:40 ◼   ► And so this was something that I did,

00:03:41 ◼   ► and I was just really encouraged that it didn't take that long,

00:03:44 ◼   ► because if you scale down the problem to something that's

00:03:47 ◼   ► fairly straightforward-- my goal was

00:03:49 ◼   ► to keep it as simple as possible.

00:03:51 ◼   ► It's like, I want to build something

00:03:52 ◼   ► that can pull in from a web service and download assets,

00:03:58 ◼   ► and has a UI that is cool in all the ways that iOS 7 UIs are

00:04:02 ◼   ► cool.

00:04:03 ◼   ► And so I sort of built that.

00:04:06 ◼   ► But now it's essentially like a four-class application.

00:04:09 ◼   ► It's very simple.

00:04:11 ◼   ► And it lets me try things out and play with things in a way

00:04:14 ◼   ► that is also kind of cool.

00:04:16 ◼   ► So another thing I did with this, which is getting away

00:04:18 ◼   ► from the iOS 7 thing, for a while now, I've been thinking,

00:04:21 ◼   ► you know, like, Core Data is-- sometimes feels like a trap,

00:04:27 ◼   ► in a good way and a bad way.

00:04:29 ◼   ► So like, Core Data, which I've used

00:04:31 ◼   ► in a lot of my applications, can do a lot of things,

00:04:34 ◼   ► and can do-- make them-- and can get you up and going very

00:04:38 ◼   ► quickly for a lot of applications,

00:04:41 ◼   ► for a lot of projects.

00:04:42 ◼   ► There's good tools in the browser.

00:04:44 ◼   ► There's a lot of documentation.

00:04:45 ◼   ► There's a lot of books and tutorials and things

00:04:47 ◼   ► people, it kind of gets you up and going.

00:04:50 ◼   ► But what I've found recently is using core data brings with it a tremendous amount of

00:04:55 ◼   ► complexity.

00:04:56 ◼   ► There's a lot of things going on and there's a lot of limitations that you have, especially

00:05:00 ◼   ► on performance side of things, that I kind of don't like.

00:05:03 ◼   ► And so I've been for a while then like, oh, maybe I should do something else.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Maybe I should use SQLite directly, which is sort of the most obvious approach for all

00:05:11 ◼   ► kind of my data persistence needs.

00:05:13 ◼   ► But I've always been like, oh, man, migrating away from that

00:05:15 ◼   ► would be really complicated, because I've

00:05:17 ◼   ► got these big, large projects.

00:05:19 ◼   ► And so I took the same philosophy.

00:05:21 ◼   ► I was like, well, let's see if I can take Simplegram.

00:05:23 ◼   ► Just take this very simple application

00:05:25 ◼   ► and change its state of persistence away from that

00:05:27 ◼   ► and into SQLite.

00:05:29 ◼   ► And so that's what I did.

00:05:30 ◼   ► And the result-- and this is sort of a mini topic

00:05:33 ◼   ► that I just kind of wanted to branch off on--

00:05:35 ◼   ► is that was actually really, really cool.

00:05:38 ◼   ► And I strongly recommend you take a look at that.

00:05:42 ◼   ► Now, you're playing at a much lower level with SQLite.

00:05:49 ◼   ► So SQLite, if you're not familiar,

00:05:51 ◼   ► it's a file-based database.

00:05:52 ◼   ► It's what Core Data usually sits on top of.

00:05:55 ◼   ► And it's basically a SQL database that runs,

00:05:58 ◼   ► but is just file-based.

00:05:59 ◼   ► So it's not one of these large server-based things.

00:06:02 ◼   ► It's just something you open a file,

00:06:03 ◼   ► but it has a very well-structured way of doing it.

00:06:05 ◼   ► And you can browse it and query it and insert into it, et

00:06:08 ◼   ► cetera.

00:06:09 ◼   ► And using it directly gives you a tremendous amount

00:06:12 ◼   ► update a value, I think if you do anything that involves batch

00:06:15 ◼   ► operations-- that's the one area that I'd say Core Data really,

00:06:19 ◼   ► really struggles with.

00:06:20 ◼   ► And this is something, as you may wonder,

00:06:23 ◼   ► I have a variety of circumstances

00:06:25 ◼   ► where I need to do things like, for example,

00:06:27 ◼   ► take a collection of articles and mark them all as a red

00:06:30 ◼   ► in Feed Wrangler or something like that,

00:06:31 ◼   ► or places where you're going to delete a bunch of things

00:06:35 ◼   ► if they're older than a certain type.

00:06:37 ◼   ► Now, in Core Data, you essentially

00:06:39 ◼   ► have to load those objects.

00:06:40 ◼   ► you can do to speed this up a little bit.

00:06:42 ◼   ► But a lot of what you're doing is

00:06:43 ◼   ► you'll end up loading all these objects into memory

00:06:46 ◼   ► and then iterating over them to delete them,

00:06:47 ◼   ► rather than just being able to make a single SQL call

00:06:49 ◼   ► and say update red equals true where ID in blank.

00:06:55 ◼   ► And it's tremendously more performant.

00:06:57 ◼   ► It's kind of one of these amazing things

00:06:59 ◼   ► that I've been thinking I should do for a while,

00:07:03 ◼   ► but having now have a sort of a toy project, an example where

00:07:07 ◼   ► I can actually try it out, I feel

00:07:09 ◼   ► much more confident about than taking that and moving it

00:07:12 ◼   ► into something else.

00:07:14 ◼   ► A side note to my side note is if you're

00:07:16 ◼   ► going to get into SQLite, the best place, I think,

00:07:18 ◼   ► to start is to get FMDB, which is Gus Mueller's wrapper

00:07:23 ◼   ► for SQLite.

00:07:24 ◼   ► That is excellent.

00:07:25 ◼   ► I'll have a link in the show notes.

00:07:26 ◼   ► It's a great way to kind of just get up and running.

00:07:28 ◼   ► And I'll also have a link in the show notes

00:07:30 ◼   ► to a tool called Base, which is a Mac application.

00:07:32 ◼   ► It's kind of a GUI application for setting up, editing,

00:07:35 ◼   ► browsing SQLite databases, which I've been using for years

00:07:38 ◼   ► and really like whenever I'm wanting

00:07:41 ◼   ► to look inside the database.

00:07:42 ◼   ► It's just a really quick way to do it.

00:07:44 ◼   ► It's an interface that I've just grown accustomed to

00:07:47 ◼   ► and really like.

00:07:48 ◼   ► So anyway, so now I have this very useful tool.

00:07:51 ◼   ► And that led me to an interesting--

00:07:54 ◼   ► another realization that I thought was interesting I

00:07:56 ◼   ► wanted to talk about is-- so what I've been saying

00:07:59 ◼   ► is that these test projects, these proof of concepts

00:08:03 ◼   ► or technological test beds, whatever you want to call them,

00:08:06 ◼   ► are useful in terms of teaching you, in terms of scaling down

00:08:09 ◼   ► a problem to something that you're only

00:08:11 ◼   ► dealing with the interesting technologies that you want,

00:08:13 ◼   ► whatever that may be.

00:08:14 ◼   ► So if you're doing a text application,

00:08:16 ◼   ► maybe you want to play out with some hot new text stuff,

00:08:19 ◼   ► you can have an application that's focused on that.

00:08:22 ◼   ► What I realized is that it was important for me

00:08:24 ◼   ► to, rather than just making it super kind of esoteric test

00:08:29 ◼   ► project, it was important for me to make something

00:08:31 ◼   ► that was actually useful.

00:08:33 ◼   ► Because if I didn't, then-- and I've done this before--

00:08:37 ◼   ► I'm not actually testing the edges of the technology

00:08:41 ◼   ► in a way that I'm just doing the bits that I think I'll need.

00:08:46 ◼   ► And then when I actually go to implement it

00:08:47 ◼   ► and properly in my application, then

00:08:49 ◼   ► there's all this other complexity that sprouts out

00:08:51 ◼   ► and grows from it.

00:08:52 ◼   ► So you want to build something, I think,

00:08:54 ◼   ► for this type of a toy project that is actually useful.

00:08:59 ◼   ► You want to build these useful toys that you can actually

00:09:02 ◼   ► sit down and use.

00:09:03 ◼   ► And so in this case, it's an Instagram browser,

00:09:05 ◼   ► which is something that I use periodically

00:09:07 ◼   ► to look at pictures on Instagram.

00:09:09 ◼   ► And so it's something that I actually--

00:09:11 ◼   ► I can just replace it, take the Instagram icon off my phone,

00:09:15 ◼   ► and put Simplegram in its place.

00:09:18 ◼   ► And I can play with it and use it,

00:09:21 ◼   ► I've seen it in a conscious way for a couple of days.

00:09:23 ◼   ► And I'll start finding the weird things that I wasn't doing

00:09:26 ◼   ► right, or the things where the places that it falls down,

00:09:29 ◼   ► or the weird bugs in the beta that I

00:09:30 ◼   ► I need to go file radars about.

00:09:33 ◼   ► These are the kind of things that you

00:09:34 ◼   ► wouldn't see if it just was a totally esoteric test

00:09:37 ◼   ► application.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And this is the kind of problem you'll see a lot with, say,

00:09:40 ◼   ► like sample code that you'll get from Apple.

00:09:42 ◼   ► It's something that you'd never actually use.

00:09:44 ◼   ► It's just a proof of concept.

00:09:46 ◼   ► And so if you're going to use these,

00:09:47 ◼   ► I think making them useful is something that's kind of cool.

00:09:52 ◼   ► And then it has a secondary benefit,

00:09:53 ◼   ► is that you actually potentially-- you can end up

00:09:55 ◼   ► in a point where you can decide, hey,

00:09:57 ◼   ► is this actually a product?

00:09:59 ◼   ► Now, it's unlikely to be a product that's

00:10:00 ◼   ► going to set the store on fire and make you millions of dollars.

00:10:03 ◼   ► But it's a project that you could potentially say, you know what?

00:10:05 ◼   ► This is actually useful.

00:10:07 ◼   ► It's something sophisticated.

00:10:08 ◼   ► It's not complicated.

00:10:09 ◼   ► It's intentionally stripped down.

00:10:11 ◼   ► But with a bit of work to clean it up and polish it up,

00:10:14 ◼   ► do the various art assets and the help and so on and things like,

00:10:18 ◼   ► you could potentially take that idea, take that test bed,

00:10:22 ◼   ► turn it into something that you can put into the store,

00:10:24 ◼   ► and then you've made it-- you've validated that time.

00:10:28 ◼   ► at even another level.

00:10:29 ◼   ► In addition to just being useful for yourself

00:10:32 ◼   ► and for your personal development,

00:10:33 ◼   ► you now have something that you can put in the store,

00:10:36 ◼   ► maybe make a little money from, or get

00:10:38 ◼   ► a little bit of exposure from, or just

00:10:39 ◼   ► have the experience of putting something in the store.

00:10:42 ◼   ► I talk to a lot of people who listen

00:10:44 ◼   ► to the show who have never actually submitted apps

00:10:46 ◼   ► to the store.

00:10:48 ◼   ► They're kind of interested in it,

00:10:49 ◼   ► or it's a hobby or something like that.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And there's a tremendous amount that you learn from actually

00:10:53 ◼   ► just putting something in the store,

00:10:55 ◼   ► going through that process, understanding

00:10:57 ◼   ► how iTunes Connect works, et cetera.

00:10:59 ◼   ► And so it's just something that I was going to--

00:11:01 ◼   ► the third level benefit of this is that you finally

00:11:04 ◼   ► have a project that you can put out there.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And it can do almost anything.

00:11:08 ◼   ► It can be very, very simple.

00:11:09 ◼   ► It can just be an application that downloads something

00:11:11 ◼   ► and shows it to you.

00:11:12 ◼   ► But if that thing that it's downloading

00:11:14 ◼   ► is useful or interesting or something

00:11:15 ◼   ► that you're going to check on a regular basis, then great.

00:11:18 ◼   ► Or it can test a new graphical API or a new whatever it is.

00:11:22 ◼   ► So just something that I was doing this week

00:11:24 ◼   ► that I thought would be interesting to talk about.

00:11:26 ◼   ► And so first, it's encouraging people to-- especially

00:11:28 ◼   ► as we're heading into iOS 7 or heading into new technology--

00:11:32 ◼   ► is to try and strip down all the things

00:11:35 ◼   ► that you're going to have to learn into a very

00:11:37 ◼   ► simple, well-defined problem, and then solve that first.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And then you can take those lessons and apply them directly

00:11:43 ◼   ► to the bigger thing without all the complexity of trying

00:11:46 ◼   ► to just dive into the thousands and thousands of lines of code

00:11:49 ◼   ► that you'll need to update and work to make it actually

00:11:51 ◼   ► work in a big project.

00:11:53 ◼   ► And two, make sure that it's actually useful.

00:11:55 ◼   ► that you yourself-- even if you're

00:11:58 ◼   ► the only person who would-- that you yourself would play with,

00:12:00 ◼   ► that you yourself would look at and use on a regular basis.

00:12:04 ◼   ► So you can really understand where your implementations are

00:12:07 ◼   ► falling down before you take them and try and put them

00:12:09 ◼   ► into something else, which is a lot of complexity

00:12:11 ◼   ► and would be harder, necessarily,

00:12:13 ◼   ► to dive down into it.

00:12:14 ◼   ► And then lastly, build something that maybe you

00:12:16 ◼   ► could actually put in the store and just take advantage of that.

00:12:19 ◼   ► All right, so that's kind of it for the day's show.

00:12:21 ◼   ► I just thought it was an interesting topic, something

00:12:23 ◼   ► that I'm definitely diving into recently.

00:12:25 ◼   ► And so I figured I'd share.

00:12:27 ◼   ► Otherwise, I hope you guys have a great weekend.

00:12:30 ◼   ► If you have any questions, comments, concerns,

00:12:31 ◼   ► or complaints, I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith.

00:12:34 ◼   ► You can email me, david@developingperspective.com.

00:12:36 ◼   ► Otherwise, have a great weekend.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Happy coding, and I'll talk to you next week.