I’m Building a New App

I’m working on a new app. After a little more than a year of focusing almost entirely on client work, I want to spend a little more time building my own. I’ll have more to say about the details of the app in a bit, but first I want to talk about a few goals I want to accomplish with this project.

Start simple and build on it. Rather than trying to do everything in 1.0, I plan to begin with a relatively modest set of features and expand on them in future releases. I hope this will make it easier to get a first version out the door, and give the app a little momentum through consistent updates. This will also give me a chance to collect and make use of some user feedback before I go too far in any particular direction.

Build something in Swift. My new app will be a Swift app. Yes, there are challenges with the tools (I’ve seen more Xcode source highlighting crashes than I can count) but I want to really get my feet wet with the new language. It’s still very early, but sooner or later I’ll need to be fluent in Swift, and there’s no better way to learn a language than by using it.

Experiment with In-App Purchase. I’ve never worked with in-app purchases in a production context, and I’d like to give it a try. IAP is clearly a huge part of the iOS ecosystem at this point, and this is a good, low-risk opportunity to get some real-world experience with it.

Ship something! I have a bad habit of starting personal projects and leaving them half finished. Often I’ll get distracted by client projects, or bite off more than I can chew in a first version. By keeping the scope narrow and allocating some dedicated time to working on the app, I’m going to get this one out the door before it gets bogged down.