The Per Rewrite Diaries: Day 41
This post is part of a series about rewriting my iOS app, Per. Per is a price per unit comparison app with a bunch of neat convenience figures, but it hasn't been updated in years, so I'm rewriting it from scratch to eliminate a bunch of technical debt. Just because it's not an open-source app doesn't mean I can't share what I learn as I go!
See the rest of the series here.
Untangling Stack Views
One thing I always have struggled with is visually reasoning about nested arrays — which, if you kinda squint and look at from the right angle, is very similar to what you've got with nested stack views.
The actual code to set up a stack view? Fairly straightforward, really. Apple did a nice job with this API. But untangling my own set up of the various horizontal and vertical stack views to create the keyboard was a bit... gross. I should have probably started by thinking about the top-level stack view in terms of columns rather than rows — blindly copy-pasting a solution from Stack Overflow often gets you to a solution while creating other problems, I guess.
At any rate, that's cleaned up now. I ended up exploring three options, and I'm not in love with any of them:
For now I'm going with the one on the far right, with the equals button in its own column.
(Yes, I'm testing with the iPhone 8 Simulator right now. I always tend to test with an older device's screen size, though I don't have a good reason for why — but I will have to take care to ensure the layout makes sense with the home bar indicator thing on the iPhone X/Xs/11.)
Tomorrow, I get back to the actual calculator functionality!