DevSketch is alive

My last post was about App in a month which is pretty much bollocks.

Remember the Object Modeller from Xcode3.  I do faintly, it wasn't very useful or I don't remember it being useful at the time anyway I'm not surprised it wasn't in Xcode4

Round about June or July when iOS7 was in beta I decided to create something similar for iPad and it had all the bells and whistles.

UIKitDynamics - tick

Parallax - tick

Tinting - tick

Incomprehensible UX - tick 

It was 'te suck'  and I let go and moved on to updating my one iOS product that does make me happy. I have been left with some good components including the bulk of the Objective-C exporter which lives in DevSketch, though so it wasn't a complete waste.

Anyway I was working on getting File Wrappered CoreData in a workable state so i could use modern CoreData sqlite files (.wal & .shm) as they don't play nice in a sandbox world.  

Trout disgracefully does this when used with non-icloud documents to avoid the thorny issue of the journal file (~filename.sqlite) not being let through the sandbox hoop

NSDictionary *pragmaOptions = @{@"journal_mode" : @"MEMORY"} ;

[opts setValue:pragmaOptions forKey:NSSQLitePragmasOption]; 

Which means theres a small possibility a crash could leave your file completely unreadable. 

I got it working and all this led to me getting enthusiastic about another OS X app. So first I built some Framework scanners to give me autocomplete and about then my contract wrapped up and I was left with lots of time to code. 

And so from the beginning of December I was able to write Dev Sketch full time and with the core components made it was mostly a case of creating UI and leveraging bindings and all the lessons I have learnt from building Trout over the past few years. 

Then I got a job but Xmas gave me another solid 10 days and it was mostly done.  Lesson learnt here - for every day of fun creative coding factor in at least 1.5 more of finishing up and doing the boring things. 

Dogfood! - DevSketch looks like this.

So in late January I released DevSketch . It doesn't have too much wrong with it and I'm really pleased with the result.

What does it do? - You can create UML "like" object diagrams and then generate stub Objective-C code.

Documentation, methods and properties and stuff that us programmers like to use can be sketched out then when its time to code burp out stubs and get going.

I have gone all out and theres no upper toolbar and the side inspectors can be hidden away so you can work in full screen mode with no distractions. 

Future things in the pipeline for it are...

- Argument names & types. Hard to do well I discovered so they didn't make it into 1.0
- Project/File import
- Integrating with FileMerge/diff tool - but sandbox might stop that.

- Test creation and test code generation. Be warned I love Kiwi