I've been writing the App Architecture book for so long that now it's done, I'm finding it difficult to just switch off. So here's some behind-the-scenes fun facts from writing App Architecture...
Fun fact #1: The first week on the book, we each independently wrote an MVC app. The MVC app used in the book is derived from the model layer Chris wrote, the folder navigation I wrote and the player and recorder Florian wrote in this first week.
Fun fact #2: We've been working on the book for nearly 12 months but I've been having so much fun that I kept trying to push major changes until I got politely told that we needed to release instead of continuing to write forever.
Fun fact #3: I wrote the first prototype of CwlViews in 2015. A draft is included in the code for App Architecture but I still haven't released the full library. Maybe there's wisdom behind "release instead of continuing to write forever". Don't tell me: I'll try to work it out.
Fun fact #4: The original idea for App Architectures was "100 ways to write an app". That number was never based in reality. Officially the book presents 5 patterns but if you include all the variants presented in the lesson sections, we got just over 20.
Fun fact #5: The companion video "8 app design patterns in a single file" is closer to our original idea (quantity over quality). It's good fun and my favorite of the App Architecture videos that I recorded but I'm glad the book focuses more on specific patterns.
Fun fact #6: We divided the work so the authors who wrote the code for each section in the book were different to the authors who wrote the prose. We deliberately described our co-writers' code, rather than our own, when writing the chapters.
Fun fact #7: It's not discussed in the book but the "server" that powers the networked versions of the app is a complete version of the app for macOS.
Fun fact #8: I spent more time trying to get the Start/Stop button working in the title area of the macOS window than I spent writing the entire remainder of the server app. Wait... is that a *fun* fact?
Fun fact #9: English is my first language, unlike my co-authors. Naturally, I was responsible for a majority of the typos discovered by the copy-editor.
Fun fact #10: The only code which is used unchanged in all implementations is the `timeString` display formatting function. Free functions are more portable than classes.
Fun fact #11: Chris and Florian made a short promo video for the book: . This replaces an effort Chris and I made to record after the "8 app design patterns in a single file" epic recording. We were too exhausted to be coherent and gave up after 5 attempts.
Fun fact #12: The About page on cocoawithlove.com currently claims the book is "due for completion at the end of April 2018." 📅🤔 We did it! 😜🎉
objc.io/blog/2018/05/1…
objc.io/blog/2018/05/1…
