Evolving LearnTheFlags app

Last week I launched my very first app on the AppStore and the feedback from family & friends has been pouring in. Even before I launched the app, it was evident from the TestFlight results that it was important to show the countries on a map. But with my minimum knowledge of MapKit I decided to drop that option and release something earlier.

Now that I'm past that phase, its time to bring maps in to the app. Once again I have been spending a lot of time reading blogs and especially Hacking with Swift.

I want to keep things as simple as possible, so that I don't shoot myself in the foot. The goal is to show a version of my flash card view on a map. So you can still continue looking at an individual country along with the flag and its capital with the map showing the country location in the background. One change I did like to bring here which is different from the shuffled view is to bring in some order. Imagine the map moving frantically when you go from one country in the West to a country in Europe to a country in Oceania. Also, a list of finite countries would be a lot better to navigate around instead of loading all ~200 of them.

To being with, I want this to be a tab of its own. The map aspect of it has earned that you enter a view thats dedicated to it. Keeping the view simple, the countries will be grouped by Continents and the view loads countries for one continent at a time. The country card will be smaller in size to keep the focus on Map. And finally, you can either go Next/Previous in order, or just tap around the location pins to see that country.  And finally a way to get to more details view just like in the list view.

If you want early access to this features, get access to the BETA version on Testflight.