I’ve got a little bit of spare time on my hands at the moment and have started to go back through the apps I’ve built and think about updating them. A big one on my list is Sudoku Grab - the first app I ever wrote, published back in 2009!
The first step in this was to actually get the code building with the latest version of Xcode. After a bit of a cull of some very old) libraries it actually built and ran!
The next step was to upgrade to ARC - this was relatively painless except for some usages of NSInvocation which I’d used for building some dynamic menus.
NSInvocation doesn’t seem to be recommended anymore, blocks are the new way of doing the kind of thing I was doing, so I was resigned to rewriting this bit of code until I realised that the only place it was being used was in the grab from camera menu. Since I’m going to be reworking the UI anyway I decided to leave in place until later.
I’m planning on simplifying the menu system quite a bit - my current plan is to replace the front screen with it’s large icons with a simpler menu structure which will combine several levels into one menu.
My current plan is to do that first and get it working nicely with iOS7 and 4 inch display sizes. And then go through each of the old screens making sure they work with both screen sizes and iOS7.
I think for this initial update that should be enough. Taking a brief look at the way the puzzles are persisted I think that another update could add synching over iCloud so that puzzles are available on all your devices. This does not look too hard - but I think the main thing to do first will be to get the UI modernised and updated.
One bonus of doing this update - I can definitely justify the need to get a iPhone5s now!