Blog

Alternative App Icons on iOS

January 2023

I really learned about alternative icons for iOS apps, when Charlie Chapman started his podcast series and caused a bunch of indie app developers to create an image in this wonderful draft-style. Inspired by this idea, I started to sketch my own version for Baby’s Vision and started to implement custom app icons in my own app. It’s not a straight forward process to add these icons, Apple’s documentation isn’t particularly helpful either, but I got it working. Fast forward to last week, when my friend Oli reached out asking for advice with an issue he was debugging and he found me in the Slack group because I mentioned app icons and I learned that there’s a much easier way to handle those icons using the new asset catalog’s features. Well, this is a post explaining both attempts.

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MapKit Location Search with SwiftUI

July 2020

In case you haven’t had a chance to listen to any of the WWDC2020 talks, SwiftUI is here to stick and I’m glad I decided to get a head start with building my latest app, Snoozie, completely with SwiftUI.

In order to look up a contact’s timezone, I provide a way to search their address and get the timezone information from it, so I don’t have to ask users to figure out what timezone their contact is in. Luckily, MapKit provides a free mechanism to query locations, so you don’t have to rely on an external service and keep your user’s data private. Read on to see how I’m interfacing with MKLocalSearchCompleter via SwiftUI.

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Building a failing app for kids

May 2020

It’s so easy to read other people’s success stories and start imagining how easy their progress towards that success must have been. But what’s so easy to miss with this approach is, that with great success (usually) also comes a good bit of failure along the way.

Now, I’m nowhere near success (in this case defined as having built an app / side project that really took off and is used by thousands of people), but I have a great failure story to share.

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The story of Baby's Vision

September 2019

I’m writing this article just a few weeks before my daughter Neena turns one year old. It’s been an incredible journey seeing her grow up, learn new things and see how she started recognizing her mom and dad and eventually flashed us a smile. But I’m not writing to share her story, but rather to share how she inspired me to build an app called Baby’s Vision (available for iOS devices only at this moment).

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