A fun app icon switcher

Another progress report on the way toward rebuilding my app, Revere, in SwiftUI (aka. Project RevereBird).

In this update, I demo the app icon switcher, which is quite unique compared to the typical ones you see in apps and the new birthday pre-reminders.

The actual functionality of this feature (the switching of the app icon) was quite simple – one line of code. In fact, there were tutorial videos on YouTube three minutes long that implemented this feature. However, it took me closer to 12 hours. The devil was in the interface.

I wanted to create something that felt nice. This is a fun and interesting experience as a user — I always love choosing icons — so I wanted to make it feel nice. It has subtle animations, buttons that feel very satisfying (like clicky switches), and little tool tips that tell you about what makes these icons unique... the fact that they will automatically update based on season or time.

Building that interface took all the effort. Creating beautiful layouts and animations in code is not like working in design tools — it is weird. And even when you know how things work, they often don't work how they're supposed to, so you're just randomly trying things. It reminds me of having an old car where you need to bang the dashboard and honk the horn to get the radio to turn on. But just like the car, once you figure out the trick, it works every time (at least until the next update of Xcode).

So, I'm one step closer to feature parity with the existing version of the app, and one step closer to the relaunch. The finish line is almost in sight.

Time to-date, learning and building — 786hrs