The halfway point in our Jack the Ripper app
As we approached the end of the first week of our final project at Makers, we wanted to get to a point where all the basic building blocks for our iPhone app were in place. That way, we would feel good about starting the second week with the ability to build some fun features and put styling in.
We started the morning by drawing out the exact flow of our app. We had discovered that this would be the best way to progress when working with Swift and Xcode: create storyboards for each page, which pairs can work on separately, and link them together. If we had the skeleton structure in place, with empty “placeholder” storyboards, we were hoping to avoid conflicts when we came to merge our work in GitHub.
The story in our app is quite short as it follows the Jack the Ripper murders, of which there were five. We chose this topic because the Makers premises are right in the middle of the area where the crimes took place, and we keep running into Jack the Ripper walking tours!
Because of the short story, we wanted to insert info pages into the app, which would include details about the crimes. The user challenges would also be themed accordingly. We started looking at what each challenge could be, and discovered that some of our ideas (e.g. games) would be big enough to be final projects in themselves…! However, we might give them a go.
We had solved a lot of technical problems on Day 4, so Day 5 was rewarding as we saw a lot of our work come together. We spent the day smoothing things out, writing tests, and doing a bit of design, and in the afternoon we sat down to ‘mob’ as we put all the pages together to create the skeleton of the project.
We’re excited about week 2, as we’ll be able to inject some really interesting stuff into the app. Stay tuned!
Alec Walker — https://github.com/AlecDWalker
Danielle Inkster — https://github.com/DanielleInkster
Heli Sivunen — https://github.com/PacificRebel
Jay Issuree — https://github.com/JayIssuree
Josh Davies — https://github.com/JoshDavies
Roberta Mangiapane — https://github.com/robertamangiapane
