Cat Service Interface

My first ever Swift App

May 21 2023

This week I opened Xcode and created my first macOS app written with Swift. It runs! Center image is an image capture from The Noun Project.

Now to make this app do something with some user input. I added a text input, a text box, and a button. The text box shows the text the user puts into the text input. The button currently does nothing.

I made this recording after sun down. No hands on work was done to make this app compatible with dark mode. Pretty cool!

May 28 2023

This week I found an API to use for endpoint querying. It’s called Cat as a Service.

I spent the week setting up HTTP GET requests in Swift and managing the View. I learned about URLSession, managing State variables in SwiftUI, converting bytes to NSImage data types, and the concept of an Optional and how to unwrap it. I’m liking Swift!

Now the user enters characters into the text box, clicks the button, and the last character of the input is removed. Also, the image changes to a random cat image made via HTTP GET request from CaaS. The two are currently unrelated.

June 4 2023

My next step is to add a drop down menu that will be populated with API Tags acquired via HTTP GET request from CaaS.

In Swift this is called a Picker. I spent this week connecting the Picker values to the CaaS API tags. I also made the text input reactive so that when a user types in a character, the Picker appears, and when no characters are present, the Picker disappears.

I struggled with managing the State variables and GET requests from the CaaS server. In order to get complete data into the Picker, I added escaping closures to API GET request methods.

The final tweak

June 18 2023

My final step is to filter the Picker contents based on the first character the user types in the text field.

I had several race conditions between View updates and API calls. I solved the issue by moving all API calls to a class where they are stored as class members and methods. This reduces the number of API calls the app makes and improves performance as a result.

The app is complete