iOS Development - Time to Hack
Trying my hand at iOS Dev
Yes, I’ve seen the videos.
I have had the dreams of a 3k a month extra income from ‘side hustle’ app work.
I even previously did some work in Android Development so how hard could it be?
Well as it turns out, not the worst.
The idea
I needed to diversify my skill set and I’ve spent a good amount of time watching not only ‘vloggers’ like Casey Neistat, Johnny Hochstetler - Jhawk but also iOS Devs like Aivars Meijers who got me thinking, “Hey I do Tech.. I did programming at University.. I already can edit videos and do cool things after nailing an A-Level in Media Studies.. Why don’t I start doing App work?”
And with that I set about becoming an part time iOS dev.
Though I don’t have any experience doing that so I need to get some.
Hitting the XP Bar, hard!
The first step in doing iOS dev is acquiring a development machine:
(It’s a joke, it’s because developers are always like ‘Look at my M3 Max MacBook Pro Mega F**ing Chum Edition, Thanks Javascript’ or similar…)
So I had a 2019 MacBook Pro (16,1 for any interested) with an i9 and 16 whole gigabytes of RAM and a 1TB SSD… It’ll more than do.
~ Now I just need a membership to Starbucks so I can always work out of one and look snobby ~
Moving on
Handily XCode is free and you can download it from The App Store.
While that took seconds to download (thanks stupidly fast fibre connection) I set about catching up on some iOS dev tutorials as well as getting some ‘boilerplate code’ for an basic ‘click me’ app.
The boilerplate wasn’t anything special but I did get to have some fun using icon generators online to make the many various sizes of icon I would need for the many different devices that may use it.
TimeToHack
My idea was to have a basic app you would click on, get a flick switch and when it is off you see nothing…. but when you flick it on… not much, just ‘Time To’ and ‘Hack’ above and below the switch which would then vanish when you flick the switch back.
I have a video of it working too:
Now, Yes, this isn’t a stupidly complicated app, hell ChatGPT could probably poop out the code to make it in seconds but I needed something just to dip in my toe and see what happens.
Takeaways
Honestly, this was actually a lot of fun. I can see why App development is both an exciting and fun time as well as ‘hell on earth’ trying to track down bugs and errors.
For any interested I put the entire project on my GitHub which in itself was a nightmare as GitHub kept bringing up that error saying “you don’t have an internet connection” every time I tried to push the project.
Ha3ks - TimeToHack : The App on Github
I believe that issue is caused by having too many files as there were like 300 files or something to push up when I eventually just drag and dropped it to the repo bits at a time;
😂😂
Other than that, It has been an enjoyable experience.
I will eventually go back to that project but not yet, unfortunately I had to sell the MacBook so we could pay some bills so I am back to being ‘One laptop Dan’ but hopefully the future will be brighter and the 2nd laptop will be more readily available… or computer… or MacMini or something.. I hadn’t considered this.. Christmas List Intensifies.
Be safe all.
🤙
I don’t have any sponsors or anything but if you enjoy my work, or feel sympathy for my wife, then I have set up a Ko-Fi account as well as a BuyMeACoffee people can donate to.