Ohio Wines iOS application

Posted on February 26th, 2014 by mriley

I finally have an application on the app store.   About two weeks ago my Ohio Wines application was accepted and is now available.  It is a free application that allows users to find wineries in Ohio.  You can find them based on an alphabetical list or you can find them based on the wine trail that they are on.  It also includes directions, a phone number and the website for the wineries.  You can also find Ohio wine events.

Development
I had been working on the application for quite some time but was never really happy with the way it looked.  I would always look at it and think it didn’t look professional.  After all this is a reflection on me and my work.  I really wanted to get it right.  I found some good inspiration sites that helped me get a good idea of what the trends were in OS design.  I worked in Photoshop to do mockups and layouts of the various scenes of the application.  Once I was happy with the final design I took the mockups in Photoshop and started getting all of it ready for bringing it in to Xcode.  The coding was fairly easy.  I saw a great tutorial from NSScreencast that got me in the right direction.  After a bit of tweaking I got the iOS application portion exactly right and working.  I also built out my Ruby on Rails application so it could have the JSON data ready for the application.  When I was ready to release the application I did some final testing on my end to make sure I got everything right.  I found a few minor bugs that I hadn’t noticed and spent the day working on those.  The actual release of the application was fairly easy.  I got everything set up and uploaded in about 30 minutes.  I uploaded my application by Saturday night and by the next Saturday I got a notice that it was in review, approved and then available on the app store.

Technologies
The technologies behind the application are Core Data, a Ruby on Rails backend data store with an API, AFNetworking for making the URL calls from the application to the Rails application and RNFrostedSidebar for the menu system in the iOS application.  The Ruby on Rails backend data store allows me to make updates on the backend and then have it update the application’s Core Data store behind the scenes in the application.  This allows data updates without having to send a new version of the application to the app store.

Final Thoughts
Developing the application was a lot of fun.  I have been developing on iOS for about 5 years now and never got an application on the app store.  I should have done it much sooner.  I am planning at least two more applications that I have had in my head for the last few years that I have never published.  I hope to do that in the upcoming months.

You can check out the application here .

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