iOS App Postmortem
Nat!:
The project started out on iOS 5, which was quickly succeeded by iOS 6. I would have been extremely surprised at the beginning, if someone had told me, that at the time of iOS 8s release our app still wouldn’t be done yet. But here is a recollection of all my faults: why it took way too long.
[…]
I bought AppCode solely to run “Inspect Code…”. The results returned are quite a bit more helpful than what Xcode Analyzer returns.
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I probably wrote a hundred little apps, that tested out some feature, or started coding a subview with it. When the code was complete I moved it into the main app, deleted the original files and then symlinked the files from the main app in the test app. This way, I could go back to the test app to tweak something, when it didn’t work out in the main app. Needless to say being able to focus on just a small piece of code in a controlled environment is much more convenient.
[…]
This unfortunately means, that I am almost invariably are going to hit a brick wall at some point in time. For example, I spent way, way more time dicking around with UIScrollView than I eventually needed to code my own custom UIScrollView. The opacity of the iOS libraries means, that I always have to guess, how it’s really implemented, guess how it could break in the next iOS version and also guess beforehand, if everything is exposed like I will eventually need it.
[…]
Subclassing CoreData classes or overriding CoreData accessors is a path to misery, where I am unfortunately still traveling on. I am not 100% sure, but I would probably have been better off, either just going sqlite-direct or to use a stripped down MulleEOF for Dienstag.
[…]
It was interesting, because “naive code” only suffered a factor 2 ARC penalty, whereas “clever code” suffered a factor 10 ARC penalty. So ARC seems to be a great programmer equalizer in that respect. I didn’t investigate other “patterns”, but I also continued not using ARC. Less magic, less pain.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
"In my opinion PCH makes me turn out sloppy code, that can't be easily moved to other projects as the header dependencies become unclear. My machine is fast enough to compile without PCH."
Based on experience, this is so true.
