SwiftUI experiment

I’ve been meaning to get back into coding for a while now. I learned Swift and started coding for iOS before I became sick and had to stop working.

Many years ago, in another life it seems, I made apps for the mac as part of my job as a physicist. At the time Apple didn’t have a dedicated IDE ¹, so I used CodeWarrior (I still have the T-shirt). That was before there was an internet, so I had physical books from Apple about the SDK. There wasn’t much in terms of help with the interface, we pretty much had to do everything by ourselves. That was for OS 6 or 7 I think. I still have my OS 8 T-shirt in any case. Later came OS 9 then OS X…

Then my life turned from doing that to doing something else when I founded my own company. Fast forward and I’m now starting macOS programming again, in Swift and using the SwiftUI framework.

Learning to code is like learning a new language, the best way is to immerse yourself. For programming that means making something that you want to use and that scratches one of your itches. I went for something for a game I have been playing for a while now, it’s called Clan Lord. It’s a MMORPG that’s been running since before 2000.

So the first thing I did was to make an astronomical panel that shows the current time in game, with sun rise and sun set times, rising zodiac, phase of the moon, etc. It looks like this.

Then I decided to read the RSS feed from the Clan Lord status, which gives information on who is clanning at the moment, and news and various in-game informations.

It was a fun project and I learned a lot from it. I’m moving on to another project now, a playing aid for a Role-Playing Game called Twilight: 2000. More on that later!