Hi, I’m Craig, welcome to the Treehouse Show.

The Treehouse Show is a weekly conversation with the Treehouse community.

[SOUND] In this episode, we’re gonna take a look

at a student submitted iOS weather app project.

Caleb’s been working on an iOS app, an app for Apple products like the iPhone or

the iPad, let’s let him talk about the project.

>> Hello, my name is Caleb Corbider and I've been a Treehouse student for

about four years now,

and the project that I've been working on recently is called meteorologist.

It is a iOS application built for getting the weather in your current location.

It allows you to sort of also pick a new location that the weather

will be fetched from forming a map and first geolocation.

>> That's cool, let's take a look at the app here in an emulator.

Nice, this looks great.

I love how you can change the location here when you need to dream about some

place maybe a little bit warmer, let's go ahead and do that actually.

So I'm going to change the location,

I want to go get out to Portland just for a second and

I want to head over to Mexico, Yelapa, Mexico.

Sounds delightful, and I'm going to use selective location,

look at right there on the water 82 degrees that is beautiful.

So this looks wonderful, we asked Caleb what kind of problems he ran into,

were's what he said.

>> The biggest issue that I've run into creating this app is the UI,

I am by far more a back end developer than a front end developer.

And one thing that helped a lot with that is open source UI libraries

that you can find on GitHub.

>> I feel you on the back end developer having UI struggles,

I run into this all the time.

I have a hard enough time coloring in the lines,

let alone lining up UI elements that industry standards.

This app looks great though, Caleb,

I think you can consider yourself a front end developer too.

It's super responsive, it's clean and crisp design.

Now I love the fact that you leaned on open source libraries.

This really helps not only for coding reasons but also for inspiration, I end up

using examples from the open source UI libraries to help really guide things.

>> Just really thinking about it, taking breaks as you get stuck on things.

>> Also, I loved advice you gave of taking breaks again, I can not stress this

enough, most of the magic happens when you are away from the keyboard.

Remember, take breaks, they're super important for your mental health and

your project.

We ask Caleb what advice he'd have for students building a similar project.

>> For students that are working with similar projects, especially iOS apps,

I highly recommend writing your UI in code instead of using the interface builder.

It gives you a lot of practice that you wouldn't get otherwise, and

it helps you really understand what goes under the hood.

It also gives you a lot more customization.

>> Great advice, now if you don't know what an interface builder is,

it's a tool that let's you sort of drag and

drop elements onto a screen to help lay them out.

What Caleb is suggesting, is not leaning on it as a crutch in an effort to

see what the interface builder is actually saving you from.

Now I've heard both approaches here, I think as you're learning using a GUI or

Graphical User Interface, abstracts away what is really going on.

Now if you want to learn the nuts and bolts of app development,

I too would recommend doing it by hand.

One thing that I'd like to point out is that Caleb actually extended

a project from the Swift course build a weather app.

Now by extending, in other words adding additional features and

tweaks to an existing app, you end up learning a lot.

Now, please make sure that you do this and

feel free to take the projects that you build during your courses farther.

This is an amazing way to here to learn and very much like what you'll be doing in

your development jobs, adding features to existing applications.

Thanks for sharing your code on GitHub Caleb, I'm sure people will love to see

how you did your magic also, thanks for being on the show.

We absolutely love seeing the amazing things that you all are building, so

keep them coming.

Check the teacher's notes for how to submit.

[SOUND] Thanks for watching the Treehouse Show.

To get in touch with the show, reach out to me on twitter or

hit us up at show@teamtreehouse.com.

I'm going to go back to dreaming about that beach in Mexico.