Introduction
In late 2025, I got inspired by Youtube and my dissatisfaction with some IOS apps that I use to create my own version of these applications that I thought could do with improving! How hard could it be…
First barrier
My intention has always been to create IOS applications and the first barrier that I discovered was my hardware. I have always been a hardcore Windows user with the occasional ventures into Linux Debian and Ubuntu to host some online game servers for me and my friends.
If you don’t know, in order to create IOS apps you use the programming language Swift and the XCode Editor which is only downloadable on a MacOS device. This meant that in order for me to pursue my dream of creating my own IOS applications, I needed to spend a good chunk of change and invest in a MacOS laptop.
My Macbook
For my first MacBook, I needed something that was able to handle the stress and workload of developing apps and something that did not break the bank.
After some (a lot) research, I decided to to purchase a refurbished Macbook Air 2020 from BackMarket. Heres an honest Back Market Review if your interested!
My Specs
- Macbook Air 13 Inch 2020
- Apple M1 8 Core CPU and GPU
- 16 GB RAM
- 1TB SSD
As this is my first MacOS device, I didn’t want to spend a ridiculous amount on it but I wanted it to be able to perform and keep up with my every day browsing as well as app development. My research concluded that the M1 chip provided me with a good balance of performance and affordability, the 16 GB of RAM will not bottle neck the laptop (like the 8GB variant would) and a terabyte of SSD storage would be plenty.
Learning Swift
While I wait to get my MacBook, i’ve got a little bit of time to start learning the fundamentals of Swift and get used to its syntax. Going from HTML and CSS into Swift was difficult and sometimes I had a feeling that I was never going to be able to learn Swift as it seemed “too difficult”. However, I persevered and did at least 1 W3 Schools lesson on Swift a day. When I previously tried to learn Python or Java Script, I would read through the W3S lesson and then move onto the next lesson.
Then when I tried to write a line of code I would get stuck because I never learned the topic just read over it. After that realisation, I made a change for the Swift lessons to ensure my success, as I was working through the lesson, I got each topic and practiced them in the W3S “Try Me” terminals until I was able to write the basics without help! This journey wasn’t as smooth as it sounds, there were moments that I thought I was going to quit and moments that I thought my efforts would just be wasted. I even took a little bit of a break to regenerate some motivation for this project and that is why this website exists!
My Goal
With my amazing backstory out of the way, what happens now?
I set myself a pretty manageable goal to create and release an IOS application to the app store by the end of 2026 which gives me around 8 months to get it up and running! That gives me plenty of time to experiment, learn a lot and (hopefully) not burn out. This will then give me the foundation to move onto a bigger and better idea but more on that in a future dev log.
My app idea
I’m personally love data and since I’ve started driving around 3 years ago, I’ve kept track of my milage and fuel usage. To do this I have an app on my phone that collects the data and processes it into something easy to look at.
This app was quite basic and a little bit outdated which inspired me to create my own solution but annoyingly since I’ve started learning Swift the developer has restarted work on it and its quite good now… Nevertheless I still want to create this as a competing app!
I’ve decided to call the app odomo inspired from the Odometer in cars!
First dev session
Today I was able to make quite a lot of progress relative to the previous days.
To get some real experience using Swift and XCode I decided to follow a tutorial which guided me though creating a Task Tracking App -
Getting started with SwiftUI with Xcode 26 for beginners (How to make an app 2026) by NDC
This is an excellent tutorial in my opinion and has set me up to create a more advanced feature and gave me the confidence to continue adding UI and other features using tutorials. While working with a tutorial, I don’t just want to watch and copy the video, I try to understand and remember the code as copying from the video doesn’t really help me in the long term.
After I got the task tracker app working, I watched a video on how to create the tab view that is so common on IOS -
SwiftUI - TabView Tutorial
Another great tutorial that I found that seperated the views, keeping everything organised and easily viewable!
Finally, I worked on some basic temporary UI (a bit too heavily) inspired from the app that I currently use. This will of course change as I go through! It was getting late at this point so I decided to call it a night and grab some food.
Today’s end result
Thanks for reading!
Have a question, enquiry or proposition?
Feel free to contact me