Tackling the Redesign: ”Finally starting the Overcast redesign, and pragmatic considerations when tackling modernization of older codebases.”
I just finished listening to this episode of Under the Radar from David Smith and Marco Arment.
Marco was sharing the stress he was feeling over the thought of a complete redesign of Overcast, all in one big hunk. The whole time I was thinking DON’T DO IT MARCO! Why? Something this large – even for a small app like Overcast – is very expensive. Marco is a one man shop, so locking himself away for months and months could be very detrimental to the continued success of Overcast. No way should he do it.
Thankfully that was just his mind going through all the steps necessary to come to the conclusion it’s in his best interest to do it bit by bit. Much better idea.
While he’s at it I’d actually encourage him to leave all that underlying Objective-C alone and jump into a little SwiftUI and Combine. He could start with some of his existing table views – SwiftUI Lists – and slowly introduce SwiftUI into his product, if that’s ultimately where his app needs to be.
Another thing he should consider is using Combine before anything introducing SwiftUI. It can absolutely stand alone.
I say these things because I’ve been working on these very dilemmas for a client at the day job. Introducing SwiftUI for simple UI has been quite easy to do and it’s been really easy to slip it into an existing UIKit app.