Ready Dev: Update Onboarding Screens

In April last year I released the MVP of my first app. If you’re not familiar, the app is called Congress Vote Tracker. I commonly refer to this app as “Civic Duty” because my inspiration for it was a desire to make it easier to participate in one of the most important civic duties of a U.S. citizen — voting. I even used that inspiration for the icon.

I released this app just a few days before Deep Dish Swift 2022. I wasn’t even close to fully satisfied with where the app was back then, but I was feeling inspired to have something to talk about and show other people at the conference.

The app has come a long way since then and this week I wanted to show off one of the most recent parts I’ve updated.

Simple and sweet but definitely not much to look at. These original onboarding screens were a bare bones attempt to tell users about a few different features of the app. The color decisions were based on the traditional colors of the Democratic, Republican and Independent political sectors in the US.

Spoiler - Civic Duty Plus

Recently new production versions of Congress Vote Tracker have only been containing bug fixes and UI tweaks here and there because I’ve been hard at work on features for the app’s upcoming premium offering, Civic Duty Plus.

That’s a story for a different week though. With not much new development shipping recently, I thought it was time to deliver something a little more impactful. What better to do than update the onboarding?

While I’m not fully sold on the body text style here, I really am so much more happy with this design. I kept the same color inspiration but gave it a modern update with a frosted glass finish. I updated the copy on the onboarding pages to be more inspirational with a call to action for the user in hopes it would encourage them to check out more features of the app.

Sometimes it’s just nice to ship something a little bit more pretty and I feel great knowing the first impression users get these days is much better. I even updated the offer page for my in-app-purchase to match the onboarding.

I guess I also just can’t get enough of that gradient button 😂

Bookmark Roundup

A few of my favorite tweets from the last few weeks.

Pol Piella, who also writes the iOS CI Newsletter, posted an article about using CoreML and Stable Diffusion to run on-device models. This is something I’ve seen a lot of people interested in for iOS and I’ll definitely be trying it out.

There’s been some talk lately on Twitter about eliminating View Models from SwiftUI apps. This is how Apple approaches SwiftUI and while MVVM felt like a natural fit for SwiftUI to me for a long time, the more I work with it, the more it feels like over-engineering.

Mohammad Azam recently released a small course on MV Design and I’m really curious to see where this idea goes this year.

Sean Allen recently released a free UIKit take home project course entirely free. What I love about this, is it covers programmatic UIKit development. I found the programmatic layout approach to be much easier to understand when first learning iOS development, and I know many companies with UIKit codebases use this approach.