After several months of tutorials and building demo iOS apps, I finally got around to building the real thing. My brother built the original Gadolinium Calculator app using C# about two years ago. A request was put in to have a second version of the app to make the table view sortable/deletable. I thought it fitting that I would build the second version.

Table View

It was thought that building the app from scratch using swift would be easier than using the original code that was done in c#. The reason being is swift provides built in sorting/deleting functionality for table views.

A different mindset

Mobile development forced me to be more of a designer than a back end developer. Every element on a given view required a lot of time and consideration. I like how I could connect each page element to the view controller so I had full control over the user experience.

Calculator

XCode

XCode is my favorite part of developing the Gad Calc application. It took me a while to get use to it, however, I thought it to be extremely intuitive once I worked with it for a while. The IDE has an IntelliJ feel to it. I especially enjoyed the storyboards for visually representing the application itself.

Storyboards

Strong Type Programming Language

I do a lot of programming using ruby and php which are both loosely typed languages. Swift is freaking awesome at ensuring things are exactly what they are supposed to be. I can see now why people may not like scripting/weak type languages such as php. However, I am not one of those people. I believe good programming conventions can make code highly dependable regardless of the language. Albeit, I might be more hesitant to approach code written in a weak typed language if I think it was developed by someone who is not familiar with best practices.