Recode CompareMe in Swift
New Programming Language + Feature Requests + Redesign
The Challenge
CompareMe was the first iOS application developed by codedifferent back in 2008. It was featured in the Apple & ATT print-ad-campaign “Helping you stretch your budget, one app at a time.” in USA TODAY, the New York Times and in Apple’s “What’s Hot” section.
It ran perfectly on iOS8, but it was not optimized for the new Apple GUI guidelines of iOS7 & iOS8 and did not take advantage of all those new screen sizes of the iPhone 5/5s/5c, 6 and 6plus. It also was not optimized for the big screens of iPad mini and iPad Air.
We also received a lot of feature requests, that could only be implemented in a complete redesign of the application.
And finally, with Apple’s release of Swift, their new programming language for iOS & Mac OSX, we wanted to dive in and explore.
The Solution
Complete redesign of the application to compare more than two products, while keeping the basic ideas of the familiar user interface.
Complete application rebuilt from scratch in Swift which now takes advantage of all those neat new features of Apple Xcode – like Custom Frameworks and Live Rendering.
Minimizing the memory footprint and the screen size interoperability by replacing image resources by programmatic drawing of all GUI elements.
Long-awaited features
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Coded in Apple's powerful new programming language Swift
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Less code by switching from Objective-C to Swift
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Parametric graphical user interface elements
Not An Ordinary Update,
But A Complete Reboot
New Features
It all started by carefully listening to the broad user base. And implementing the highly requested feature, to compare more than two products, changed everything.
Redesigned GUI For All Screen Sizes
We wanted to support all those different iPhone and iPad screen sizes. Consequently, we redesigned the entire GUI based on the new design paradigms introduced with iOS7.
Rebuilt With The Beauty Of Swift
If you want to get the full benefit from Apple’s modern programming language, you need to start from scratch. We did just that.
From Painting Pixels To Painting Code
To minimize the memory footprint of the iOS app, we coded our graphical elements. No memory expensive image resources were used for buttons, backgrounds and icons in different screen sizes.
