Refactoring Like a Boss

Bringing Order to Chaos

Dark Mode for evening Kayaks

I like to create a lot of sample projects where I can workout features of an app. Though there extra some setup involved, it let's me refine a feature to the least code needed to support the functionality I am want.

For Paddle Mate, I have a project for Charts, one for Barometer tracking, one for Realm, and one for the Stroke Detection algorithm that is the heart of the project.

Today has been a day of bringing those together and things are shaping up as I move parts into place.

Gone is my MVC (Massive View Controller from last weekend) as I have now broken the app down into a clean hierarchy of:

• Frameworks
• Source
• DataModel
• Managers (For lack of better naming)
• Utilities
• Views
• ViewControllers
• Tests
• Products

Design Payoffs

The nights spent reviewing design tips, fonts, colors, and then creating multiple mockups has paid off. I am much happier with the look of the app as I integrate the various features. Having designs to guide me is speeding up development. 

I am occasionally getting slowed down when I find I missed something but refinement is part of the process and learning experience. Now I know I need some additional views to handle the clean starting and stopping of a workout when I need to manage location services, mapping, Microsoft Band connections, pausing, continue, and whatever else I missed.

A big payoff for my workflow has been the purchase of PaintCode. I first heard about PaintCode from friends at Shopify who swore by it. I broke down and bought it few months ago and started to learn how to use it.

Since then I have become more adapt with it and have started to build up a library of icons for my apps. This has helped me speed up development time as I can reuse assets while I work.

Another big help with design assets has been:

• The Noun Project where I look for inspiration and often use icons from there, with attribution.
• Entypo+ with it's wealth of SVG pictograms.

Over time I plan to build more of my own icons so that I can build unique assets which I own.

Well, off to bed. Another long day with 15 hours of coding. Today was not a fill the rings kinda day.

Sunday (today) I plan to tackle:

• Upload workout to a fitness tracking site.
• Export to Health App Integration.