This is a demo app created for showcasing purposes only.
It's a very basic jog logging iOS application that stores user's jogs in the cloud, and provides some basic filtering and reporting functionalities.
The app is using Parse as the BaaS provider right now, but the plan is to build a custom more-RESTful API in the near future, to show backend development skills.
The project uses CocoaPods for managing dependencies, and builds using Xcode 6.1 and LLVM 6.0.
The app runs on iOS 8+, and it's optimized for iPhone and iPod touch devices with any screen size by using autolayout.
Tests are implemented using the default XCTest framework and run from Xcode, more information about testing with Xcode can be found here.
There are several improvements for this app in the readmap:
The app doesn’t have any local storage yet, so it works in online mode only for now. In a real world project, offline mode would be a very useful feature for this kind of app, and implementation is pretty straightforward using CoreData, and even more straightforward using an ActiveRecord implementation for CoreData like MagicalRecord.
As an user of a real world app, I love being able to login with services like Facebook or Twitter. Email validation and password recovery are default features too.
Analytics should be in place from the first beta build in a real world project, using some external service like Google Analytics or Flurry makes it an easy task.
It’d be great to track actual jogs using and display them by using CoreLocation and MapKit.
Normally, I would setup beta build distribution from the first sprint and start delivering as soon as possible, probably using TestFlight.
Internationalization and Localization is really important for a real world app, even if it doesn’t support multiple languages in the first releases, but the plumbing should be in place from the beginning of the project.
Accessibility is one of the greatest things about iOS, and yet it’s overlooked by many apps.
Default iOS controls are great, but an app with good graphics and animations truly stands out from the crowd.
Making the most of the available resources should always be a goal in any real-world app, so profiling to find performance bottlenecks, battery draining spots, and wasted memory is always a good practice.
Crash logs should be properly stored to be useful to the developer (easily dSYMd, with timestamp and other relevant information), probably using some external service like Crashlytics.
Logging should be handled using a good extensible framework like CocoaLumberjack, to easily manage different log levels and log destinations (like a remote server for errors).
Having a custom RESTful API would be great for showing backend development skills.
The API now uses token based authentication, ACL authorization and SSL. Security is reasonable, but in a real world project I’ll probably invest more time on it and do more testing.
The API should scale pretty well right now as it’s using Parse, but in a real world project I’ll probably make some tests and see if it can deal with the expected usage scenario, and probably build a custom RESTful API from the ground up.
The app code, and most importantly the API interface should be really well documented on a real project.
Users like sharing stuff, it would be nice to have some very basic social features like following users to see their public jogs in your feed, giving kudos and commenting on a friend's jog, and sharing jogs on Facebook/Twitter.
It would be nice to have some kind of challenges to keep the user engaged with the app, user created routes with ranking, and a global jogger ranking (maybe with the ability to split it by location) so users can compete against each other.
Integrating the app with HealthKit would be awesome.
Charting weekly stats would be great, so the user can have a better overview of his progress. Also charting jog speed and elevation gain would be a killer feature, but GPS has to be integrated first.
Listening to music while jogging is the most common thing to do, so having playlists integrated into the app to avoid switching apps could be awesome.
It would be great if the app could tell you about your speed, time and distance while you are running, it can be done using AVSpeechSynthesizer.
Automating the test process with continuous integration, need to setup Xcode Server and OS X Server.