iPhone Development

Moon Phase Clock

Information about this project:
On The App Store | v7.1 - 11/17/2016

iPhone version of Moon Phase Clock

This app is a rewrite of the actual very first app I ever got working on a mobile device. A couple of years ago, when I started my very first project, it was to make this app, for the Android. The upshot of the Android is that you can create desktop widgets. And since it was the very first thing I ever tried to actually make, I went with the simplest thing. So the original version was literally nothing but a widget. It had no main views.

In the time since, I've updated that app repeatedly. I added a means of scrolling through the days, and a graphic of where the moon is in relation to the Earth, plus the Earth's rotation. I then added a second view that is a full calendar month, which is also scrollable.

So this version includes all of that, except the widget, as iPhones don't do that. This version also incorporates the last update made to the original program. That being special lunar events like eclipses and blue moons. All of which are visible in both views.

the other interesting thing about this app (to me, anyway), is the "tabbed" design. Xamarin (for that is what I'm using for this stuff), offers this up as one of the templates. So I gave it a shot with this. Also, rather than using the "Storyboard" thing that allows you to build these views visually, I did it all with code. I did this because one major gripe I have with Xamarin is that the Storyboards are unreliable. They are unstable as hell. You could click the wrong checkbox and the whole file gets corrupted and disappears. Yes, this has happened for the record. Also, many of the features, like keeping things centered on the screen don't work. So the layout for these pages is done entirely in the code. More difficult at first. But WAY better, and more reliable results.

The absolute original code base for this was written in JavaScript. In fact, this is the original version:

Download link:
On The App Store | v7.1 - 11/17/2016