What is happening with odomo?
Odomo is also in its very early stage of development and I have been using it to learn more about Swift and put some theory into practice and start developing something. Although I have not gotten very far with it, I want to work on something that I feel more passionate about. Therefore, for now Odomo devleopment will be paused, I may revisit it at random points or it might lay dorment forever!
What is the new project?
My new projects is called Vatsight which is an open source native mobile app for IOS. I have chosen VatSight as my first major project as it allows me to work with maps, aips and complex functions. The start of the project will be very basic, but this foundation will let me build a complex app while learning step by step.
What have i done so far?
Website
The first thing after thinking of a name for the app was to secure a domain name I purchased - vatsight.com
Following the domain, I got it connected through cloudflare then to my webserver and designed a temporary website to the project. Its very basic right now and I will be working on it at a later stage.
Website
Github
After the website, I began to set up a Github repository to be a home for the project files. For now its only a basic set of readme, contribution and license files as well as the website, xCode project and branding. I then setup a workflow that deploys the public folder to my web server whenever I push a change through and only if the public folder is modified.
GitHub Repository
xCode
I went into this project completely blind. Best way? Probably not but I was eager to get started with it. I first looked into MapKit, got it setup and displaying on the simulator and then started digging. I found that MapKit locks you into an apple maps base app and doesn’t provide many customisations. Then I thought back to osm. Open Street Maps can be used to provide free and up to date maps through tile set providers like Maplibre. After a quick look at the documentation, I imported maplibre into the project, replacing the MapKit map and then looked into how I was going to execute my app. After a little bit of research, I found that Maplibre, although customisable, was a bit tricky to work with (at least from a beginners perspective).
Then finally I remembered and looked into Mapbox. Mapbox has a very generous free plan (up to 25,000 monthly users for free), its very customisable, documented well and has all the features I need for my app. Doing some research about my competitors, I’ve found that some also use Mapbox meaning it can definatly be achieved!
I then spent some time customising the map and creating my own theme for it to resemble the Mapbox standard map but with much less clutter on it that you wont need for a Vatsim Map. With how versatile Mapbox is, its possible to have user created themes on there. But thats for later on in the dev process. After a while, I got to the design that you see below and I’ve started to put in some UI. I’m not sure what UI design I will go for yet, thats for the next dev log.
Thanks for Reading!
Have a question, enquiry or proposition?
Feel free to contact me