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Had a great time talking with @ashfurrow on his wonderful iOS podcast, Springboard.
I give some advice to those wishing to get started building iOS apps, and tell some behind the scenes stories of building Conditions for iOS. There's even a hilarious @gruber anecdote in there, Give it a listen!
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I'm extremely happy to announce that my all-new minimalistic weather app, Conditions for iOS, is now live on the App Store!
I wanted a beautiful app that would give me a quick answer to the question of What's the weather like?
Many weather apps clutter their interface and overload their users with tons of details that aren't all that useful. Conditions only shows you the most important information about what it's like outside right now, wherever you are, anywhere in the world.
Conditions is hyper minimalistic. It displays a simple, 5 day forecast indicating what it's going to be like outside each day, including the temperature.
You can easily tap anywhere on the face of Conditions to toggle it into an even simpler more, showing only what it's like outside right now. Intentionally hiding all of the typical "noise" information associated with weather apps.
Conditions also knows when it's dark outside and will automatically adjust it's look and feel to match the time of day. It has both a light and dark theme.
I had a lot of fun making the website for Conditions. First off, it's all completely beautiful retina resolution.
I also got to play around with a ton of subtle but awesome HTML5 and CSS techniques. Notice the app launching after the page loads? Try clicking/tapping the home button on the iPhone. Also be sure tap or hover over each of the different features screenshots. They all use some really neat CSS Keyframe animation techniques to subtly describe each of the app's features.
It came out looking something like this:
It's fully responsive of course, and uses Apple's Smart App Banner technology to easily direct website visitors to the app on the App Store.
Make sure you pull to refresh once you get the app, I'm pretty proud of how that came out. ;)
Conditions for iOS is available in all App Store countries and supports all iPhone and iPod Touch devices running iOS 6 or later.
You can download Conditions for iOS on the App Store by clicking here.
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The guys at Github have been rocking some awesome Objective-C open-source stuff lately, and their latest release, Mantle, does not disappoint.
Mantle makes it easy to write a simple model layer for your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application.
Mantle has the potential (and already does) get rid of a ton of boilerplate model code. It provides default implementations of all the common <NSCoding> and <NSCopying> methods, as well as isEqual: and hash methods.
It also provides an awesome little method called mergeValuesForKeysFromModel:, which makes it easy to specify how new model data should be integrated.
My favorite feature though is how it cleanly utilizes reversible value transformers to allow for easy re-encoding back in to JSON at any time, not only that, but it even handles migration by automatically saving the version of the model object that was used for archival. Then, upon unarchiving, the migrateExternalRepresentation:fromVersion: method is invoked (only if migration is needed), giving you a convenient hook to upgrade old data.
Mantle is still in it's early days, but it looks quite promising.
You can read Github's blog post about Mantle here, and you can check out the Mantle Github repository right here.