Since retiring from full time work over a year ago, I've had a break from iOS programming. Doing something as a job is a great way to lose interest in it as a hobby.
Recently, after a dalliance with Google's excellent cross platform framework Flutter (and the Dart language), I decided to have a play with the latest version of Swift, 4.1. I'm pretty familiar with the Cocoa frameworks but in line with Swift conventions many of the APIs have changed. Happily, Apple's documentation browser is excellent these days.
WSPR Watch is a free app I wrote some years ago basically for myself to provide a quick way to check for WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) signal reports from a phone without having to use a web browser.
Over the past week or so I re-wrote the app in Swift 4.1 and found this a very pleasant environment to work in. A problem with the rapid changes in the Swift language in recent years is that when you search for how to do something you'll find a version of the code that isn't quite right with the latest Swift. This problem will hopefully diminish over time.
The other thing that's changed dramatically for the better is the whole process of submitting an app to the Apple store. What used to take a week now takes hours and the process is much more straight forward than it used to be. App signing used to be a buggy mess but now seems to work reliably too.
Thanks to my beta testers and particularly Ross, VK1UN, for bug reports and feature suggestions.
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