Diary of a Diary – Building My First iOS App

Diary of a Diary – Building My First iOS App(medium.com)

26 points by andyv88 11 years ago | 11 comments

zarify 11 years ago |

Loved this. Some really interesting design ideas there - I quite liked the icon-driven one with the week's worth of timelines. Since I don't lead a very busy life (at least with regards to events) I think something like that would work quite well for me, but I get how it would turn into a nightmare quickly for people with busy schedules.

andyv88 11 years ago | |

Thanks! Looking at implementing something similar as a week view for the app.

kiliankoe 11 years ago |

This was very interesting, thanks for writing it up! And I have to say I'm thoroughly impressed by the end result, looks fantastic!

Do you have anything planned to pull in data from the iOS calendar? Probably wouldn't be easy to work out how to fit this with the idea of possibly syncing timeless events back as well. I love your app's visuals but not so much the idea of manually keeping two calendars more or less up to date.

andyv88 11 years ago | |

Cheers!

Nothing planned at the moment, but I've been thinking about it. Hard to sync events with times into a diary where there is no concept of time. Even harder to go back the other way.

danchristian 11 years ago |

This was an interesting read, thank you. Did you do much research around the pricing and if so what prompted the final choice?

andyv88 11 years ago | |

Hi Dan,

I didn't do too much research to be honest. As a beginner, in-app purchasing looked a bit daunting, so I decided to start simple with an up-front cost. I chose the Tier 2 price so I can run promos to the Tier 1 ($0.99) price from time to time.

Down the track I might look at making it free with in-app purchase or something though.

atmosx 11 years ago |

The problem with all these apps is that you have to feed the data, which is not optimal in a mobile phone using the keyboard. So most of the times it's an overkill (loosing 5 minutes everytime you need to set up a reminder)...

I use these tools either as a small addition to my notebook, but everytime I tried to use them exclusively, I got burned.

andy_ppp 11 years ago |

This is very good! I have a similar but tangential idea that I need to get built - good to see such a successful concept and execution.

The running icon looks really weird though!

andyv88 11 years ago | |

It does look a bit weird doesn't it!

kadder 11 years ago |

nice app, did you use any UI libraries that you found useful while building the app , esp for the flat UI and calendar ?

andyv88 11 years ago | |

Hi kadder,

No I didn't, except for the Twitter-designed emoji and a few icons from an icon pack I purchased. I looked at many libraries for the month view but I ended up just making it myself so I could control exactly how it looked and felt.