Port to Apple - updates

Continuing the discussion from See you on the flip side:

This is awesome news!
Cheers!

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Likely I’m not the only one who’d love to hear how this is progressing.
Any chance of an estimated release date or are you going to tease us a bit longer?!
:grinning:

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Hello all,

Sorry for the lack of progress reporting.

We did hire an iOS developer and worked for about 4 months on iFlowx. It was a bit of a tough process because the Android code was bad and I had to rewrite it so the developer didn’t copy the bad code. This took a bit of time. I also took the chance to fix some shortcomings of the current Android code. For example, to allow accumulated precipitation and anything to be plotted on the graph.

For the iOS development we got up to a basic UI and plotting graphs. The next step was the map code - this was going to be a big task.

Anyway, the iOS development stalled because I couldn’t keep up with rewriting Android and had about 4-5 months of urgent contract work come up. That finished bout a week ago and I’ve just come to the end of two weeks working on porting again. Here is the progress report.

I’ve decided to rewrite the Android backend using KMM (Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile). This will allow the use of the same backend code in both the Android and iOS app. Only the presentation code (UI) will have to be written for each platform. This is going well.

Fortunately, we can use a bit of the iOS code developed above.

The advantage of KMM is that we don’t have to write, test and debug code on both platforms. This was a major headache with the iOS development above. The Android code was quite complex for the iOS developer to port and understandably, many bugs crept in and debugging took a lot of time. We don’t have this problem with KMM.

The other advantage of KMM is that when I add a new feature, it can happen in both Android and iOS immediately. In other words, it will be easier to keep feature parity.

Now, the best advantage - it looks like there is work to get Jetpack Compose (the new Android UI framework) working on the desktop and web. This means there is a chance for a desktop and possibly the web in the nearer future.

What’s next? Well, I hope to have the graphs going (to the level we had in the iOS development above) in a week or two. Then start on the map code - this will be hard.

Prod me in 3 or 4 weeks and I’ll hopefully have some screenshots.

I’m quite excited with the KMM development and the possibility of a desktop app.

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Thanks Duane for the detailed update, much appreciated - gives us a warm feeling to know things are progressing behind the scenes (and keeping you both busy) please keep up the good work.

Happy to prod you every so often if we haven’t heard from you for a while, cheers.

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Yes thanks @duane for your update!

I think that @jolley speaks for many of us when describing appreciation.

Keep up the great work!


The

decision sounds sound and wise, given the

-argument allone.


Bonus-exiting with the potential possibility of

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Thanks for your awesome work. Have been waiting for its release for ages haha

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@jingw222 welcome to the forum!

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Is the name iFlowx an internal pet name or what you plan to call the app on the Apple App Store?

It would be great to keep the same Flowx name on both ecosystems if possible in my opinion.

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Just a pet name so I don’t have to keep writing “Flowx for Apple”. I’m calling the rewrite of Flowx “reFlowx”. And “Flowx” is just the current one.

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Phew!
:+1:

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Yes, verry reasonable. :ok_hand:

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17th of September Update

The current state of the Android and Apple app is pretty boring since most of the work is in the background and the Apple version is not compiling.

I’ve finished a bulk of the backend code and now working on loading data. This will add a bit of color to this screenshot. Following this, I’ll work on the map.

Once I finish the graphs, etc… I plan to hire a SwiftUI expert to flesh out the Apple app. I tried to code up the Apple UI but realised it was taking too long to do a poor job.

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Always good to hear how you’re getting on with this, thanks for the update.

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Luckely compiling does not necessarily need to be boring…

Keep up the great work!
Cheers!

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Sadly as a solo developer, compiling isn’t as exciting as you portray :frowning:

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On another note, I know Android development is pretty boring at the moment but we’ve been through this background rewrite before in 2017. This development led to high-res data sets like HRRR and Arome, way-way faster downloads and many other features.

Along with an Apple release, I am hoping this rewrite will allow more data type including “feels like temperature” and “accumulated precipitation”, theme editor, a better graph editor, plotting anything on graphs and gauges, faster addition of data sets, fallbacks editor (e.g., Arpege falls back to ICON instead of GFS), and many other cool features. Oh, and possibly a desktop version and maybe a web version??

For the meantime, we have to quell our desire for instant gratification and play the long game :slight_smile:

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All this sounds amazing!
Cheers!

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Awsome cant wait! I just moved from android to apple and im lost without my flowx forcast!

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Welcome to the Forum and Thank You for Using Flowx

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Same for me and I just bought the license in September.

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