Logan Melton

Create an app that shows "Florida Man" articles for the current date in previous years.

• Ability To Share Articles
• Search by Date

This project was pretty cut and dry. Once the API was in place, the build was pretty intuitive.
Custom Table View Cells were used rather than default configurations. Unfortunately, Apple's API for UIDatePicker does not allow for only Month and Date selections. Can be futher iterated upon and provide a cleaner UX.

Original intent was to use a standard news API with a default parameter "Florida Man". Unfortunately, was not able to find an API that met the budgetary restraints of the project.
Eventually, we found a website and article by University of Princeton researcher DUDE'S NAME, that scraped Reddit posts featuring news articles about "Florida Man".

Design and develop an app to search for receipes, then parse the instructions and ingredients into a "Step-By-Step" format.

The first API used only retured the recipe and ingredients, but no instructions.
The API in current use makes liberal use of Optionals and Nested JSON properties. This slowed development down significantly.
With every object property being Optional, checks are spread through out, including a dedicated object model that only contained a static function to parse the network call results into a [String: String] Dictionary. This had the added benefit of not having to convert data types into Unwrapped Strings, which again, would require unwrapping of Optionals.
As for the Nested JSON properties, the first approach involved the strict heirachy that is an exact match for the network results. This was followed by CodingKey Pattern, where all properties, including nested properties were defined withing the original model, and immediately followed with an Enumuration that conforms to the CodingKey protocol.
However, that was not ideal either. Once the models were restructured again into a strict heirachy, but with liberal use of generics, then we were able to proceed.

Provide a resource to view details on all Studio Ghibli films.

• View All Ghibli Films
• Option To Sort By Title
• Option To Sort By Release Date

The original networking methods were extremely limited. These were converted to using Generics for response and JSON decoding.
Additionally, providing each view with full networking call and parsing was unweildy. These were extracted into an external layer to provide portability and has since become my default networking scheme.

Build a simple, gesture based Snake Game based on the classic Nokia 3310 game.

• Change Direction Based On Swipe Directions
• Game Board Not A Defined Grid

• Phase 1
• Generate game board & food at random location within game board area
• Generate snake at a random position with an initial direction and velocity towards the center of the game board

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• Phase 2
• When snake eats the food, that food instance is removed and new instance is placed at another random location on the game board
• Create a new snake segment to append onto the "end" of the existing snake. "End" is defined as the opposite side of current direction to the last segement

The primary challenge of this project was largely the limitations of SceneKit and SpriteKit.
The interactions between a physics elements in complex organizisms, as I have found, is not ideal within the frameworks.
A number of approaches were applied to resolve the issues of the snake itself, including an indepth dive into SKPhysicsJoints & SKPhysicsBodies.