My Books

• My Year With Apple Watch

  As the Apple Watch hits its first birthday, there seems to be in increasing number of bloggers complaining about it. One (which I refuse to link to) titled "My Year of Hell With the Apple Watch". I think the article has since been re-published with a slightly less inflammatory title, but really! Did somebody rivet the watch to his wrist? If it was so awful, why not just stop using it?

  I am a watch nerd and have always loved watches and having one on me. I liked watches with features and even had a calculator watch at one point although as a woman with skinny wrists, I found it constantly annoying that watch makers put all the gadgets into man-sized watches so I was left with the choice of no features or a watch that looked stupidly large on my wrist.

  Read More »

• How To Confuse TestFlight

  I ran into an unusual problem when testing my latest app: "What Is My Speed?". It is now available from the iTunes App Store, but getting there was a struggle.

  Read More »

• Road Trip Apps

  Over the past few months, we have done two long road trips: one approximately 4,000 km and the other about 1,800 km. These gave us the chance to try out various apps for navigation and travel information. We live in Queensland, Australia and some of these comments may be country-specific.

  ---

  Navigation

  The basic navigation came down to three apps:

  • Apple Maps
  • Google Maps
  • Metroview (Australia and New Zealand only)

  Each has their strengths and weaknesses:

  Read More »

• Structs vs Classes

  One of the big debates among Swift developers is when to use structs and when to use classes.

  Classes are the building blocks of object-oriented programming but structs as provided by Swift are newly powerful. Structs have been around in C-based languages for a long time, but Swift has made them more powerful and given them more features so that they are almost indistinguishable from classes. So what are the differences and which one should you use?

  ---

  Where they are the same?

  • both can define initializers
  • both can define properties
  • both can define methods
  • both can conform to protocols

  Where they are different?

  • classes can inherit from other classes
  • structs cannot inherit from other structs
  • classes are reference types
  • structs are value types

  ---

  The reference type vs value type difference is where things really get interesting. Have a look at this example of a class with a single property:

  Read More »

• Learning Swift - Optionals

  Read More »