Devlog: December 29, 2022

With the holidays, my routines have been all messed up. So it’s been over a week since I last worked on anything. Today I finally woke up early(ish), did some exercising, and now taking some time this morning to get back into things.

I wanted to improve the UX of picking movies and seeing results. This is how I left it a week ago:

A lot of changing context

It’s fine. But not good. A lot of tapping and things popping up. I wanted to streamline it.

So this is what I came up with:

Wow! It's like magic!

I like this a lot better. 2 big improvements in my opinion:

1. You are not taken to another location to view the results.
2. You do not trigger a comparison, it happens immediately when 2 movies are selected. It will even update when one is changed.

It feels a lot faster to me now, which is probably good.

As far as code, I made a custom ViewModifier for the shape and shadow of the movie posters because I was using that in a few places. I can never remember how to do that, so I always go to Hacking with Swift.

I also had to make my models Equatable so that I could use .onChange. I also used .onChange’s ability to capture the previous value to compare it:

.onChange(of: comparison) { [comparison] newComparison in
    guard let first = newComparison.first, let second = newComparison.second else {
        return
    }
    if first != comparison.first || second != comparison.second {
        Task {
            commonCredits = try? await MovieDataService.shared.compare(first, to: second)
        }
    }
}

Nifty!

I think the next thing I need to work on is improving the search experience. I’m not 100% sure what the TMDb API gives back for search, but it doesn’t seem to limit or sort the results as I’d expect.

And a name. Need a name.

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