It’s apparently been a little bit since I’ve posted. My family and I have been sick for about the last 3 weeks straight. Has not been fun. Took me out of my groove and I haven’t made much progress on things. Starting to get back into it.

I’ve made one substantial change to ScreenCred.

Casey Liss of ATP and other parts of the internet, is working on a TMDb iOS client called Callsheet. If you’re a subscriber to ATP, you can join the TestFlight. He recently added support for a URL scheme to open movies, shows, people in his app. I was very excited for this! ScreenCred currently lets you open the details of a movie or person in an in-app browser or Safari. But with this new URL scheme, I can open the details in Callsheet instead. I think this is a much better experience.

Feeling lazy, so no demo right now.

I had never used another app’s URL scheme before, so a couple things I learned.

• You need to add the URL scheme to info.plist using LSApplicationQueriesSchemes.
• You can use UIApplication.shared.canOpenURL to essentially check if the app is installed. In my case, I fallback to the default of opening the details in an in-app browser.

So now, if you have Callsheet installed, you can open details from ScreenCred in it. Pretty neat.

I’m also working on expanding my URL scheme to allow a single movie or show to be opened in the app. This would let apps like Callsheet open ScreenCred from a movie details page, or something like that. Probably won’t be used, but will help me sleep better at night.

Projects ScreenCred devlog

I decided to do the themes or color collections or whatever.

So many colors

I like this. Gets rid of a lot of the issues I had before. I started with the basic system colors, but there’s opportunity to add a lot of custom colors. Eventually down the line, I think I’ll add a theme builder or something.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m sick, so this is all I have energy to write.

Projects ScreenCred devlog

As part of the redesign, I wanted to add the ability to select an accent color. But I also got it in my mind to have a random option where the accent color will change every time you open the app.

Screenshot of an iOS picker menu showing several accent color options

This was my first attempt. A simple picker. 2 things I don’t like about this:

1. You can’t preview the color.
2. You don’t know which colors are included in “random”.

I started thinking of a way I could create a multi-select color picker. This is what I came up with:

Screen recording of an accent color picker showing the selection of multiple colors

I’m not 100% sold on this idea, but I like it. If you have multiple colors selected, then the app will randomly pick one each time it opens. If you have a single color selected, the app will only use that color. One issue I ran into was how to ensure at least one color was selected. I didn’t really want to pop up an alert if you deselected them all or something like that. So I decided to go with disabling the last selected color so you can’t deselect it. Not sure this is the best idea or not.

Overall though, I like this idea of having multiple accent colors and seeing a new one each time I open the app. I might scrap this color picker and switch to some preset “themes”, or collections of a few colors. That would get around the issue of deselecting all the colors. Could make a theme builder too.

Projects ScreenCred devlog

I decided to go full force into the redesign. I’d like to give credit to the inspiration for this design, but I can’t remember where I saw it. I think I saw it fly by in my Mastodon feed, didn’t think much of it at the time, but it got stuck in my head.

Main Comparison Search Settings History

I like it. I feel like it adds some personality to the app. Still needs work. There’s some spacing/alignment issues, and dark mode needs quite a bit of work.

Projects ScreenCred devlog

I’m experimenting with a new style:

A screenshot showing a new style that is a little more bold and vibrant

Not sure if I’m going to stick with it or not. But I like it. I want my apps to feel a little more custom.

I started to migrate more things to this style, but I ran into the most random issue. I’m unable to make custom ButtonStyles. I’ve tried in a new blank project and it works fine, but not in my project. I have no clue why. It just says, does not conform to protocol 'ButtonStyle'. But it does…

I’ve tried clearing all my derived data and even reinstalling Xcode. Nothing.

Projects ScreenCred devlog

I saw this book recommended on YouTube and for whatever reason, I thought I would read it before I watched the video. While this book was rambling and repetitive, I did manage to find some interesting nuggets of knowledge.

These are some of the things that stuck out to me:

1. Detach your time from income. It’s not enough to own a business. If the business is dependent or tied to your time, your income is immediately limited.
2. You need to be a producer. You’re probably not going to make millions working for someone else.
3. Becoming rich is not easy, but it can be done “quickly”. You are the best investment you can make. The market will give you 5–8% on your money over 40+ years, but you can get many times that if you are dedicated and passionate enough to build a business.
4. Don’t focus on the event of becoming rich, but on the process that would make that happen.
5. Continually learn new things and focus on your education so you can adapt as needed.

While none of this is new, but sometimes you need to read or hear something a dozen times before it connects. But most importantly, it got my brain thinking and processing things in the background.

Here’s the video that initially got me interested. Ali Abdaal summarizes and explains the concepts of the book very well: