AR Bookmarks - Dev Notes #9 - Titles Not Links

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The premise of AR Bookmarks is to add links to the real world. So that is what I did. In hindsight I see that was the wrong approach, technically. By using the name field of ARAnchor, I was able add the URL of the bookmark into the position in real world but when it came to adding a title I wasn't able to. So for a long time all bookmarks had a long URL whenever you tried to see what site they point towards. While that worked in the MVP sense of "get everything working to some extent", I prefer the MVP sense of "a small amount done well" so I knew it couldn't launch like that.

The solution was to make all bookmarks use an ID instead of URL for the name and that would then grab from the database both the URL and title. This sounds extremely simple when worded like that but it was quite a change to the code as beforehand the bookmarks that ended up "in the real world" didn't have access to the database. Only the browse view did, as that was created later. So I took the opportunity in v0.16 to refactor the code and bring consistency around how the data is handled.

Instead of making the user enter a title straight away, I've gone the route for now of keeping it as it was before but I've added a rename button to the rows in the browse view. So you can click rename, type the new title then the bookmarks will now have the title when you add them. Currently any added beforehand do not automatically update (at least not until you restart the app) so that also needs adding at some point.

Release notes - v0.16:

Read more about AR Bookmarks.