Many iOS developers seem to go for very complex storage solutions when iOS offers very quick and easy ones that are much better for many tasks.
I myself made such mistake in the past. When the iOS SDK first came out I decided to make a little game for the iPhone. It was a little card game and as such it had to store the values for each card as well as information about the deck and cards the player collected. And I used the worst solution possible.
Sometimes it is hard to know which technology to use in iOS for a specific task.
Storing data is indeed one of these cases. When I wrote my first app, a diet app for the Mac when the iPhone did not exist yet, I used Core Data to store its data (macOS and iOS share the same technologies and frameworks). Looking back, I think that was probably the right choice at the time, given the kind of data the app handled. But back then I had no idea and no way to tell. I picked Core Data just because I heard other developers talking about it and I didn’t know any other way. When it came to store static data in the app, though, I definitely made the wrong choice.
Continue reading
I believe that most of the business advice for iOS developers you read online is wrong.
I run both a freelancing business and an online business related to iOS development. The funny thing is that I do so ignoring most of the common business advice I usually read, while I still have great results for both my businesses. Most business advice I read aimed at app developers just makes me shake my head.
Ten years ago I moved my first steps developing apps for Apple platforms. Like many others, I had the dream to become an indie developer, make my own apps and be independent one day. It all started when I saw a presentation about being an indie developer by Will Shipley. I shared it with a friend and soon he came back to me with an idea for a Mac app (the iPhone still didn’t exist back then). At that time he was trying to follow the Zone Diet, which is a pretty complicated diet requiring a lot of calculations. So he though that an app to help people follow that diet would be a good business idea.
I have had many job interviews during my career, for different companies. Most of them were for a position as an iOS developer. I still have such interviews from time to time, even though I am a freelancer. This happens when big companies want to add me to their existing team to temporarily speed up their development process. Do you know what all these interviews had in common? They never focus only on iOS development. I would actually say that the questions about iOS development are usually around 50% of all the questions.
When I was in university, I had to take a course called “Foundations of computer science”. Since this course was placed in the second trimester of the first year, it was an immediate roadblock for many people. Unlike others, I found the course to be very easy and passed the exam quickly with the maximum grade, with almost no studying. I am not saying this to brag, but I think there is an important lesson there.
View controllers have a central role in iOS apps and build the skeleton of every app you make. This is because each screen of the app is represented by a single view controller. Because of this central role they have, they are at the center of a lot of activity and perform many duties during their lifetime.