Icelab

They say to avoid the big rewrite. Luckily, Decaf Sucks isn’t that big.

Importantly, one of the app’s key reasons for being is to give ourselves an opportunity to build something great for iOS. When it comes to great, a lot has changed since the middle of 2011, when we released the app for iOS 4. This includes the development tools, which have grown to include:

• ARC (Automatic reference counting)
• Modern Objective-C (literals, object subscripting, automatic synthesizing of properties, no need for private method header declarations, etc.)
• Storyboards
• Auto Layout
• Collection views
• OS-integrated Twitter & Facebook support
• Cocoapods
• And the much improved editing environment in Xcode 5

Getting our hands onto these will make the app more fun to develop and improve our ability to add great new features further down the track. Decaf Sucks was also our first major iOS app. We’ve learnt a lot since then and there’s plenty we can tidy up.

The mobile app development world is moving fast; the list above proves it. For a small app like Decaf Sucks, it makes sense for us to build with the best and latest available tools, and not to handicap ourselves for the sake of the broadest user base (especially when new iOS adoption is so fast). So Decaf Sucks 2 will be built from scratch, and for iOS 7 only. Apple is taking their mobile user experience to a significant new place, and we want to do everything we can to arrive there too.

Check back for the next post, where I’ll share some thoughts on our design approach!