I've been interested in native application development for a long time, especially on iOS since most of my devices are from that ecosystem.

While playing Destiny's Iron Banner event I came up with the idea for this app, which fell into a uncovered category in the App Store. Admittedly, it is not a completely new idea as similar applications already exist on the web or on other platforms, but I set out to create something new with a focus on design.

From the beginning I wanted to create something that fit right into the iOS ecosystem, while still resembling the interface of Destiny. This meant thoroughly studying iOS interface guidelines and playing quite a bit of Destiny.

Things I've learned

This was an entirely new experience for me, developing a native application for the first time, so of course there was a lot I had to learn.

Getting into iOS development seems like an overwhelming task at the beginning, but there are lots of great tutorials and guides on the internet. I picked up pieces of information all around and tied them together to create a first working prototype, covering just the absolutely essential functionality. From there on I kept learning new things, using new frameworks, and including more and more functionality.

I wanted to make the application available for free and to include additional shaders — custom themes I created resembling Destiny-related subjects — as In App Purchases. This lead to some more difficulties, mainly setting up the iTunes Connect account correctly. In the end, however, I managed to include everything I wanted in the app and officially release it.

Technologies I've used

The application is written using only Swift code, which I found a lot easier to understand than the traditional Objective-C code that was used up until recently. Swift was a great language to learn and write and I look forward to creating more applications in Swift.

Aside from the language I've used many features of Cocoa and UIKit, and of course StoreKit for the In App Purchase functionality.