A long time coming

I sat down to start work on the second version of Fight Scores last November with hopes to have it out by the following Spring. Those hopes ultimately proved naive as development has taken much longer than that.

A lot has happened in my life since I wrote those first lines of code, in addition to the standard annual affairs such as a birthday and Christmas, I also was lucky enough to finally see my country make it to a major football competition for the first time in my lifetime. My dad and I had made a promise to one another a long time ago that if Wales ever made it to a tournament, we would be there, regardless of where it was held. This past summer in France we were able to fulfill that promise. Perhaps the most significant life change however, is that my wife and I are expecting our first child in December.

Fight Scores 2 ultimately took me 11 months to write because in addition to life interrupting development, I choose expand the scope considerably. The original version was written in Swift 1 and used Core Data and iCloud for syncing. For version 2 I opted to build and maintain my own web server and sync system. While this was far more work, I had never felt comfortable relying on iCloud to protect my users data. Setting up my own server and API also allows me to add a web component in the future (which I’m currently working on).

I've also added some of the most popular features requested from users in app store reviews. Most noticeably, search functionality and the ability to specify the winner of a fight.

All in all this update took far longer than I had expected it to but that doesn’t take away from how proud I am of this release. I personally feel that version 2 of Fight Scores is so much more powerful and advanced than version 1. Additionally, due to the way it’s built, theres plenty of room for expanding the feature set in the future.

I’m excited to see how this app evolves. Fight Scores 2 is available for free on iPhone and iPad in the App Store today.