Over a year has elapsed since I last updated this blog, and while the silence that succeeded it may have been a sign of desertion to the occasional visitor, I can assure you that has hardly been the case.
Fall 2014
In the summer of 2014, my journey with Python and the Kivy graphics library ended with the final iteration of Meep. An IRC client that had been the fruit of over a year of development, it represented my first major project in Python, and ironically, an end to an era as well. As fall of that year grew closer, I decided to set aside my passion for Python in pursuit of fairer seas. While Meep had presented a fantastic learning experience, it was plagued with dependencies and other design issues that made it hard to share and develop. I concreted my decision by picking up the Nerd Ranch's guide to Objective-C, and spent the most of my fall semester reading through the exercises and completing the numerous in-book challenges. When December finally came around, I felt I was ready to start something new.
Spring 2015
January of 2015 marked the beginning of my work on an official App. Having felt I was sufficiently experienced to begin such a project, I bought myself a developer license and set on off. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do at first, but somehow along the way I became determined on making an N-body simulator. The project immediately became very challenging for me after that, as It involved a lot of work with Apple's SpriteKit library, something I had never covered in any of the book tutorials. Eventually, by following the documentation and the invaluable advice of past StackOverflow users, I managed to put something together. By May of this year, my App was functional, but missing a good UI and the additional fluff I felt it needed to be a more complete experience.
Summer 2015
It was sometime in early June that my App finally got approved for TestFlight, and external-testing began. The initial results were ... disappointing. Of the four or so testers I had initially given access, almost all of them reported that the App was confusing and practically unusable. This meant I was to go back to the drawing board when it came to the UX, and spent most of June replacing my gesture-exclusive navigation system with actual buttons and other visual clues. When early-July came around, I had updated the Beta 21 times and addressed countless bugs, UX issues, and more. It was sometime around then that I finally submitted my App for official review, and on the 20th of August, 2015, it cleared.
So here I am now. It's 7:43 PM, Eastern Standard Time, on the 20th of August, 2015. My App is ready, and I'm prepared to let whoever sees this know where I've been for the last year.
