I'm really excited to announce that App of Holding is now available on iOS! I've been working on this for a while and I'm really happy with how it turned out. However this is just a first iteration, I have a lot of ideas for how to make it better and more useful, and I will be talking about that as we go.

Of course, I know in my first post I said I was going to bring you all with me for the development journey, but that turned out to be a personal process, I suppose. I spent a lot of time working through one of the myriad training programs for iOS development that can be found online, and to the credit of the program I found, it was really well produced and the instructor was fantastic. However...

Apple happened to be in the middle of a transition to a new paradigm in iOS development, and SwiftUI is the new hotness. So it turns out I had spent weeks of my time learning what turned out to be the old way of doing things. We are early enough in the SwiftUI lifecycle that there are really not a lot of resources for learning out there just yet. Apple has good documentation to their credit, but I'm the type of learner who needs an explanation with examples.

So my path was obvious: beat my head against the code until it does what I want it to do. I won't lie, I wanted to throw in the towel several times. It was a real struggle to bring my brain around to thinking in terms of declarative programming, but I very slowly, and somewhat surely, figured it out. I'm still not a master, but I'm getting there. I'm really excited to have reached a goal I've had since I had my first iPhone. Being a dad with young kids, it's really hard to find time to work on projects. My kids are getting older now, and I'm finding that I have more time to work on things.

I will be very honest with you, I don't think this app is going to be a major hit. But I do hope you enjoy the artwork. I used Midjourney to generate all of the artwork and I have to say, some of the images are really beautiful. If you get the chance to play with a generative model for art, I highly recommend it. I plan to incorporate more AI tools in my coming projects, in this app, and maybe even this website. My creativity caught fire when OpenAI released their chatGPT API, and I've already built a code bot with long-term memory to help me write code. I hope to write about that soon. Until then, please enjoy the app, and I look forward to hearing your feedback!