Falcon Tracker – chasing rockets using SwiftUI

Interested in tracking rocket paths? Want to see a real-life application of SwiftUI? If so, I think you’ll be interested to hear about our new app, Falcon Tracker, which showcases SpaceX rocket launches and has a simple, user-friendly interface. It’s the work of a whole team of passionate people at 10Clouds, including developers, a 3D modeler, UX and UI designers and project managers. We wanted to show you how it all works.

Why did we create it?

The main reason we created Falcon Tracker was because we wanted to test the biggest surprise of The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), namely SwiftUI in the production environment. SwiftUI is a new declarative framework for building user interfaces for all Apple’s Platforms. If you want to read more about it, have a look at our blog post on the subject. At 10Clouds, we are all about real-life application, and we decided that rather than conducting tests on a fictional example, we would apply it to a real product, and one which was of particular interest to us – SpaceX.

What is SpaceX?

Many of you will have heard about SpaceX – its a company which works on the design, manufacture and launch of advanced, reusable rockets and spacecraft, and gained worldwide attention for several historic milestones. It is currently the only private company able to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, which it first did in 2010. Later, in 2012, it made history again when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station. Its rockets are called Falcons, which provided the inspiration for our name.

The SpaceX community is strong and has a number of fans among us here at 10Clouds. We were impressed with the awesome API that’s been created for tracking SpaceX flights. That’s why we made full use of this and coupled it with stunning design and a highly functional user interface in Falcon Tracker.

Features

We’re proud of the range of features that our app offers, including a mission list, information about individual rockets, rockets in AR, live streams of rocket paths, reminders and more. Below are just a few screenshots to give you a flavour of the product.

What’s next for SwiftUI?

SwiftUI is a revolutionary piece of technology in Apple’s world. But it is also the first release and as in Swift, it doesn’t cover all the use cases yet, and will probably change a lot in the first two years. Keeping in mind that businesses usually want to support at least two versions of iOS, and building custom designs is still quite challenging (although it’s getting easier) I wouldn’t recommend using it in app production this year. But according to the Human Interface Guidelines, having a code that works on all Apple’s platforms is something that’s difficult to ignore, and most likely in two years’ time we’ll all be writing in SwiftUI.

Would you like to read more about SwiftUI? Find the link below:
SwiftUI – An Unexpected Party

Looking at creating your own project in SwiftUI? Want to find out more about our work on SwiftUI or a range of other platforms? Why not drop us an email on hello@10clouds.com or visit our website: https://10clouds.com/