Cook With Me, Built for the Next Decade

2020-04-26

The new Cook With Me version written in Swift using storyboard is coming soon. I hope we can meet June 30th deadline set by Apple. The truth is, the current version of Cook With Me in the Apple App store works well on iPhone and iPad running iOS 13.x or 12.x. In fact, the app runs fine on an iPad2 with iOS 9.3.5. Going forward we will only be able to support iOS 13.x only. Why can’t we be backward compatible?

In a perfect world, I would support older devices. Per the current App Store guidelines, Apps for iPhone or iPad must be built with the iOS 13 SDK or later, and use an Xcode storyboard to provide the app’s launch screen. Also, all iPhone apps must support all iPhone screens and all iPad apps must support all iPad screens. Meeting these requirements with the current app built in Objective-C is really hard. Hence, we are building the app completely in storyboard. This means we will have to drop support for older devices running iOS 12.x. Existing users, don’t worry. Your app will continue to run fine just like I still run the app on my iPad 2. I am proud that we supported the current version for last seven years through multiple iOS and iPhone & iPad releases. Now is the time to think about next seven or more years.

In a blog post on March 10th, 2019, I discussed 2019 development plan. It’s been a journey since then. Mostly, we have been fussing with the quirks of Xcode and storyboard. The tool-chain we are forced to use is not helping. Many a times I was so mad to the point of abandoning the project. That’s something for another post. Rick, programmer in the team kept things going. We are making good progress as I write this blog post. Highlights of the upcoming release is a new search feature, and recipe pictures will be stored on the cloud, instead of your device. This allows you to quickly find your favorite ingredient in a recipe or a recipe, and saves space on your device.

Meanwhile, Cook With Me continues to sell in the app store. We sold 60 app units in Q1-2020, better than same period last year.

Milind