Monday July 11, 2011

Design Evolution of an iOS App

Props to Matt Gallagher at Cocoa With Love. It’s not often that you get smart developers ranting on the poor design of their own old code. Learn from this:

By this point in the implementation, the first mistake has emerged: the ambiguous overuse of the word “location”.

Yes, ambiguous naming is a design mistake. It’s not exactly an aspect of design that is thoroughly discussed — probably because it’s considered self-evident — but as your program evolves and new functions, roles and elements are added to existing classes, it is sometimes necessary to change the names of the classes.”

Excellent thoughts. Naming things is so difficult that it’s a running joke among computer scientists. Names are important because source code must communicate clearly to humans. Yes, it is the blueprint that the compiler or interpreter uses to build and run the application, but the human has to read it to augment it.

The whole post is full of good design tidbits like this. Read it and learn.