Zach Simone's homepage. Student and iOS developer from Sydney.
I'm excited to introduce the Android version of Six Again . It joins the iOS app as the best way to check and follow NRL and State of Origin all season long. Six Again launched earlier this year , and the response has been great. The single most common piece of feedback? "Make an Android version." So here it is. Check the score without unlocking your phone! Six Again is the only app that shows NRL…
v8.1 of Petty - my fuel price app for Australia and the UK - is now available on the App Store . A few months ago, when announcing v8.0 , I said I was hoping the groundwork done recently would let me move faster on the long list of things I wanted to improve. 8.1 is the first sign of that. There are two things worth noting about this release: Price history per station Petty has always shown you…
Today I'm excited to introduce a new app: Six Again , available on the App Store . The headline feature is NRL scores on your Lock Screen. It uses the Live Activities feature of iOS to let you follow teams or individual matches. The launch coincides with round 1 of the 2026 NRL season, which kicks off in Vegas later today (go the Dragons !) NRL scores on your lock screen! Like many, I'm obsessed…
Petty 8.0 is out now . The headlining feature is that, for the first time, Petty now has fuel prices beyond Australia. That's right — it now has UK prices! The UK Government has recently introduced a mandatory fuel price reporting scheme , much like various Australian states have done for the last little while, and so it seemed like a sensible next step for Petty. That means all the great features…
This is all my opinion based on personal experience, not a recommendation to use or change the devices you use. Obviously talk to your medical professional before making decisions about what medical device is best for you or how to use them. If you want to skip my rambling, the news here is that the Dexcom G7's direct to watch feature is now available in Australia! It appears to have been turned…
Today, I am excited to be introducing Charged . Charged is a new iOS app for drivers of electric vehicles (EV's) around the world, helping them find available chargers. With Charged, you can find EV chargers, check their availability in real-time, and be notified once availability is found. What can Charged do? Along with finding chargers, Charged can help you view real-time availability with…
We're about 5 years past the introduction of SwiftUI and it's impressive how far the framework has come in this time. However a part of SwiftUI that has been noticeably inferior than its UIKit counterpart is anything to do with MapKit UI. MapKit , particularly when used with UIKit components, is a very detailed and well thought-out piece of kit, but that's only really true when used in a UIKit…
It can be difficult to know where to focus your attention as an independent software developer. There are always more ideas and more features to build than you have time for, and being able to prioritise effectively is a skill unto itself. A skill I'm not very good at, but nonetheless. It was only a month ago that I introduced a CarPlay app to Petty . The initial response was better than I…
Today I'm excited to announce the release of v7.0 of Petty with brings a major new feature to the app: support for Apple CarPlay . Petty is an iOS app I've built and maintained for over 6 years, and features real-time petrol pricing and trends for various states around Australia. At the time of writing all states and territories except for Victoria and the Northern Territory are supported. Petty…
For many years now, I have run a small software business . I'm the only employee. Most of what the company does is contract work for wonderful clients, and I've had the privilege of working on projects and teams that I thought I'd only ever get to admire from afar. The company has also built and sold software products through the App Store, which is becoming an increasingly larger percentage of…
I'm thrilled to introduce you to Glucomate . That feels good to write. It's been a long time coming. For over 20 years, I've had to monitor my blood glucose every single day. The way in which I monitor it has changed a bit over the years, but the need to stay on top of the readings hasn't. During that time, I've heard various things about a cure for type 1 diabetes. Funnily enough, it's always…
The problem Cast your mind back to the early days of SwiftUI. It wasn't possible to have multiple .sheet modifiers attached to the same View. Or, for that matter, to the same "tree" of the view hierarchy. Apple has since fixed this, at least for Sheet, so code like this is now perfectly valid: Text("Hello, world") .sheet(isPresented: $presentSheetOne) { Text("Sheet one") } .sheet(isPresented:…
I'm thrilled to today release v4.0 of Petty to the App Store. Petty is an app made for NSW motorists, designed to help them stay up to date with real-time petrol prices, average prices, and trends. Petty has been on the App Store for over three years now, but this is its biggest update yet. A lot of work has gone into this release, with some features being a work-in-progress for the better part of…
Note this post is current as at the time of writing - 4th August 2020 - and at such time Xcode 12 beta 3 (12A8169g) is the most recent available version of Xcode. At WWDC20, as part of a bunch of new SwiftUI UI elements, we got Map . It's a super limited Map API that should only be used for the simplest of Maps. UIKit's MKMapView is still the real-deal for the time being. Hopefully this changes…
Petty v3.1 is now live on the App Store . I'm excited about this release for two reasons: The app now finally looks presentable. The UI isn't embarrassingly out of date, it supports light and dark mode, and it looks a lot more presentable on the App Store. This is the first version of Petty that points to my own custom API, instead of directly hitting the API of the data provider. This gives more…
Intro and rationale So you've got a Swift Vapor project that works on your machine, and you're ready to host it publicly and make that glorious API available to the world. But how? Although I do a lot of frontend software development, especially with Swift, and have built simple backends in the past, I've never had to deploy the backend code before. I've recently had a need to build and deploy a…
It's all too common when scanning a Swift codebase to come across the dreaded lines of code import Alamofire or import Moya . At a point in time, almost any iOS app built will need to send or receive data from an API. The adage is that job of an iOS developer is turning JSON into rectangles on a screen. Sending and receiving JSON is big part of iOS development, and there are a million and one ways…
This blog. It's been a while. There's good reason for that, however. Most of the tech/developer things I would write about here I get to talk about on the podcast I've been recording weekly for over a year now. Since it began, we've changed the name. It's now Cup of Tech . Just over 18 months ago, I wrote extensively about using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for the first time, after 16 years…
I'm in the process of building out a Mac app for one of my iOS side projects - Petty - using the new "Catalyst" tools announced by Apple at WWDC this year. Petty has become my iOS development playground, as I use it to experiment with new iOS technologies. This was the case with Siri Shortcuts last year . My motivation for finishing work on the Mac app for Petty is that I'll be presenting a talk,…
When Apple acquired TestFlight in 2014, they integrated it into App Store Connect (called iTunes Connect at the time), but kept the purpose of the service very much the same - allowing developers to easily distribute pre-release builds of their software. I'm curious as to the direction Apple will take with Buddybuild. I see a few ways it could go. Buddybuild could become a premium CI service, as…