This article is about The Political Outlook App. If you would like to download it please click here:
Hi everyone,
I am Arjun from The Political Outlook, and I am the one that has coded the Political Outlook app. The app is entirely written in swift and supports any iPhone or iPad Running iOS 15.6 or later. Any mac running MacOs 13 or later and any watch running watchOS 8 or later.
I Would like to thank the others from The Political Outlook and all those who beta tested this app
This was the first app I have ever made, it took me quite some time to learn the conventions of the app. As before this project I have only written python and javascript.
I started development of the app in July of 2024. I initially wanted to provide the following features:
- Access to all articles
- Accessible Search
- fluid links between articles and their associated quizzes
The first version of the app was very basic. With the app showing quizzes on 2 separate pages. This didn’t really make sense especially with how the main content on our site are articles. Here are some screenshots below:
As you can see the app looks quite different from now, with one of the most notable changes being the fact that there is no “home” tab. This version also had many issues, such as the fact that the you could only view the last 10 posts, or that the articles would show random artefacts.
The artefacts showing in the app was due to the fact that the data returned was not being read properly. I later changed this as I also had to account for images in the articles:
The Refinement
The initial version of the app was only ever used internally. The first version that ever was released for public beta testing was more polished. Firstly it fixed the data parsing issue. It also solidified the design of the app, and brought around quality of life improvements such as haptics and content caching (where the app saves an article locally to stay quick and use little data).
At this point the app could have been released, but since I was using iOS 18 to develop could not release the app. So I took the time that I had to think what else would make this app great. Then I decided that I should add the following features:
- Notifications
- Haptics
- Statistics
- Watch App
These features were more complex to implement, and therefore took me to September, where after testing for a couple weeks the app became live on the AppStore.
The great thing that writing in the language swift and specifically making the Interface with SwiftUI was that I was easily able to create The Political Outlook App for Apple watch, iPhone, iPad and Mac without massively modifying my code.
The Future of the Political Outlook App
This app has been great to work on. I hope that you all enjoy using The Political Outlook app.
I do want to add some more features to this app such as:
- Customisable Notifications
- Statistics Syncing across devices
- Saving articles to read offline
For Reference for me to get the app to this state I have spent at least 24 hours since July developing this. The last version of the app (as of writing, Version 2.3) took 4 attempts before being approved.
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