Jess Robinson - Fool's Dog

Picked up last weeks work on the Fool’s Dog iOS app, almost immediately found the issue I couldn’t find in an hour of looking last week, why is this always the way!? #programming #ios #foolsdog

→ 11:39 AM, Apr 25

In the weird world of app dev, an SDK invite: Our innovative solution works silently in the background, indexing public websites by utilizing unused resources from devices. This unique approach not only boosts your revenue but also significantly enhances user experience and retention. #foolsdog

→ 9:48 AM, Apr 17

Fool's Dog intro

I should probably explain what this #foolsdog stuff is about! Fool’s Dog is a small team that make iOS and Android apps for divination, contracting with Tarot & Oracle deck authors to profit share.

I’m the tech side of things, currently I am working on an iOS release which will bring all the individual app decks into one app, with an In-App-Purchase for each deck. This work was initiated because of a requirement from Apple, they decided not to like our having ~90 apps with very similar functionality, mostly differing in the images and books.

It’s kept me busy a while, as I’m learning the codebase and the language (Objective-C) on the fly, as well as upgrading parts of it to work with newer iOS SDKs,

I’ve got the functionality pretty much done (barring issues found by beta testers), decks can be bought, will be loaded, a default can be chosen, favorites set (listed first when picking a deck). Now I’m working on importing the rest of the existing decks (which were previously released with various ages of the software).

Look out for future ranting at iOS, Apple, code, plists and other fun things!

→ 11:53 PM, Mar 7

Busy day, started a tool to verify that decks are consistent, debugged one deck, and released a test flight update with more decks, and working Favorites selection. Why you’re only allowed 2 favorite decks, is left as an exercise for the reader. #foolsdog

→ 11:02 PM, Mar 7

Today in iOS app writing fun: did you know you can just - declare not to dark mode at all? (Yes we should fix it at some point!) Also fixed, loops over the actual length of an array (index 0 beyond bounds for empty array), plists that weren’t valid XML (xcode doesn’t complain!?) #foolsdog

→ 12:43 AM, Feb 16

Today was a ‘twiddle with all the things’ day, fix inconsistent website links, add paging to API rest clients (revenuecat and the app store), add more IAP decks, debug strange errors in the beta app maybe due to products loading slowly? Maybe I should cache those.. #foolsdog

→ 11:38 PM, Feb 14

Yesterday I gave up trying to get the AppStoreConnect API to give me prices for existing apps (trying various endpoints and parameters), and manually copied the data out of the ASC ui instead. The goal here is to deploy one app with In-App-Purchasing for the variants, instead of ~90+ apps.

→ 12:12 PM, Feb 8