My friends and I have been playing Formula Dé for quite a while. We play it so much, we have a yearly league. We even attempted to bring the game in to the infield of the Indy 500. It was so hot, we never played, but attempting to playing in the IMS infield required some ingenuity. This resulted in me obsession for years over an app to control your Formula Dé drivers without having to worry about the multi-piece control panel.

Hence, Formula Control was born. It’s definitely over engineered, but that’s how I like to do things. Beyond the simple things, like controlling all of the aspects of the game and ensuring every rule is considered, it also uses new parts of the iOS operating system that I had never considered before. The app works well on the iPad, utilizing keyboard shortcuts and Split View. It also has been audited for accessibility features like VoiceOver and Inverted Colors. I even learned SpriteKit to make a subtle flag waving animation.

Check it out on the App Store, and make sure to review it if you happen to be on of the few people to still play this board game.

This is a small update to fix some keyboard issues under certain circumstances, specifically with iOS 11. Get the update on the App Store.

There will be a much larger update for iOS 11 in the future.

It’s been nearly 5 years since its latest release, but Score Card 2.0 is finally here. The last release was designed when everything was skeuomorphic and iPhones just received their first different screen size. That design limped through the years, so it finally was time to make the jump to a modern look and feel. That, and it was going to get kicked off of the App Store if I didn’t update it.

My wife, Mallory, helped give the app an actual logo and design. This is a big update to the hand-designed look I slapped together in the beginning. Score Card 2.0 also adds a few new features:

• Player names are now saved, so starting games with your friends and family is only a few taps away.
• Editing scores is now done on the game screen, and can be done on an individual basis. This makes scoring quick and easy.
• Games can be edited after they have been started, so you are no longer stuck with a setting once you’ve started the game.

On a technical note, the entire app has been rewritten in Swift 3, and uses my Structure library for data management.

Please check out Score Card on the App Store. If you like it, please also leave a kind review. I’d appreciate it.

Structure 1.0.1 has been released. This release brings minor changes to best practices for Swift. Specifically:

• Audited closures for use of @noescape.
• Audited parameter throws for use of rethrows.
• Concurrency testing.

Before Swift, projects that I worked on used SQLite directly. I could have done the same with Swift, but it felt like I could benefit from writing a wrapper. I used this as a means to teach myself Swift, as well as create something that I could reuse throughout my projects.

Enter Structure! Structure is by no means a complete SQLite wrapper. This framework performs the basic CRUD operations I need, as well as maintain some semblance of thread safety. It also provides simple data access and value transformations.

If you’re curious, check out the GitHub page. There is some simple documentation and lots of tests to get a feel for how the framework works.