Guidance Getting Started - A Golf League App

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Now retired, my career was developing end user software (MRP's), hence, familiar with DB based solutions.

I have been using Excel to manage a golf league and getting tired of all the steps involved. Part of tasks list - updating player status, putting together weekly teams and creating Teams sheet and scorecards. Weekly Results. (Not a complete list)

Wondering if writing an app will make life easier in the long run, plus, some day I will need to pass the coordinating to someone else. It would be easier for them to learn an app versus all the steps in Excel.

Questions... Do I develop using Swift (and deal with finding future replacement with a Mac), or do I develop using a cross platform (MacOS/IOS and that other familiar GUI OS?

Where do I begin? Where are resources for learning?

Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome.

Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

44m

I have a couple of big picture points for you to consider. The first is about your reason for doing this. If your goal is primarily to have fun while you make something, let that guide your technology choice. For example, there might be good reasons to implement this as a website (see below) but if you’re not enamoured with web development and really want to make a native app then… yeah… that’s what you should do.

OTOH, if you want to ship and maintain a product then it makes more sense to follow a technology path that’s appropriate for that product, even if it’s less to your taste.

Second, the one up-front decision to make is whether this program needs to share data between multiple users. If it does then you’ll need some sort of server technology. It might be possible to use an existing service — in the Apple ecosystem that’d be CloudKit — but that comes with its own set of constraints. If those constraints don’t work for you then you’ll end up needing to build your own server. And if you have to do that anyway then… well… maybe you could build this as a website rather than an app.

OTOH, if you intend for this to only be a single user thing then there’s nothing stopping you from shipping it as an app.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"