The Per Rewrite Diary: Day 10

This post is part of a series about rewriting my iOS app, Per. Per is a price per unit comparison app with a bunch of neat convenience figures, but it hasn’t been updated in years, so I’m rewriting it from scratch to eliminate a bunch of technical debt. Just because it’s not an open-source app doesn’t mean I can’t share what I learn as I go!

See the rest of the series here.

Thinking ahead

I mentioned yesterday that I’d work on understanding a Simulator bug that I’m seeing when dismissing a detail view controller today. I’m stepping back from writing code today, though, to get a feeling for where I am and what I hope to accomplish this week.

I’m really happy with progress so far! I’ve gone from an empty Xcode project to something with a couple of views and some models and the skeleton of a useful app, more or less. I’m learning (I mean, aren’t we all, always?) and have gotten a lot done in about an hour a day for the last week and a half. I want to keep up this hour-a-day cadence, but I think it’s worth thinking about how to best approach that hour too.

The app isn’t yet usable, so my goal for this week is to have it in installed on my iPhone and using it for doing at least dimensionless price comparisons. That shouldn’t be too hard to do, as I’m almost there — just need to add some labels and text fields to the detail view controller.

BUT! There’s also a complete lack of tests, so I’d like to slow down the forward momentum and add some coverage for unit tests. I’m rusty with testing a Swift app, so that’s something I’ll spend time learning as part of my Per time this week, too.

Here are the goals for this week:

A way to clear the product list

Right now, I can add products to the list for comparison, but the only way to clear them out is to force-quit the app (or wait for it to be terminated in the background). A way to clear the list is important.

A product detail view that lets me enter quantity, units, and price

Right now the product detail view only adds a randomly-generated ProductItem and that’s… not very helpful, so I want to add a basic form that lets me enter the price, quantity, and units for a product. I don’t want to worry about dealing with units yet, though, so I’m going to default to dimensionless units.

Unit tests for the product and product-list models

At a minimum, having solid testing coverage for your models is pretty important, and I will look at testing the view controllers later as they’re likely to be refactored a lot between now and the end of this project. I’ve never really explored UI testing on iOS, so that’s going to be something that I worry about later.

More to come tomorrow!