My first foray into native (non Cordova) iOS apps has been in the works for the last couple of weeks. I read through Matt Neuburg’s iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift and Programming iOS 10 (although I cherry picked the parts I thought I’d need in this one) and then got started writing my first app, tentatively titled WallpaperCapture; A camera app that lets you take a photo for your iPhone lock screen and home screen with all of the labels and objects you’d normally see superimposed on the screen so you can frame the scene perfectly.
The goal with this app right now isn’t to get rich (I’m going to release it for free, possibly ad supported) but rather to practice what I’ve been learning, and experiment with interface objects and frameworks that I’ll likely need in the future on a much larger project. I’ve got a preliminary build that I’m testing right now that provides the time, date and other lock screen labels of an iPhone, along with the Perspective Zoom so that the photo that you take will look exactly as it does when you set it as a lock screen photo. The photos are currently stored into an app specific album in the Photos app, but I’m planning on having an in-app library to see all of the photos that have been taken. Eventually I will provide a way to upload the best images ‘to the cloud’ so that the photos can be shared with other users looking for interesting and unique wallpapers.
I’m in the process of implementing Fabric.io’s Crashlytics for app statistics prior to releasing the app to some users via TestFlight (email me if you are interested in being part of the beta test group). Once that is done and I’m ready to implement the ads and photo upload, I think I’m going to integrate with Firebase since it is an all in one SDK for ads, cloud storage and countless other features that I may need in the future.
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