This is really inspiring, man. Great work, and good luck. I might do one of these solo hackathons myself, given all the stuff I have floating in my head that never gets to see the light of day. Sort of reminds me of http://hackalone.org - a "hackathon for introverts", which was shared on HN a while back. I normally just end up buying domain names and sitting on them, until I get a notification a year later reminding me of my failure :-) I have a tonne of ideas I get excited about every now and then, some of which I think are good, all (or most of) the knowledge and tools I need to implement them, no pressing financial constraints, and a decent amount of free time. Yet I rarely start any of them, and the ones I do start I do not finish. It's frustrating trying to understand this complete lack of motivation.
PS: I'm a little bothered by how you used "transgendered" in reference to UI design. Some people might find it insulting.
Haha same with me man. My cycle is 1. come up with an idea 2. buy a domain for said idea 3. repeat step 1
It wasn't until very recently that I made the very obvious discovery of "the only way I'll ever make it is to make it". I discovered that entrepreneurship is not about coming up with ideas, it's about bringing those ideas to life. I wrote about this epiphany here: http://bitar.io/the-entrepreneur/
Loved the second article too. A bit like the saying "Writers write." I keep looking for that point when I get lost in my work, a state of flow, and I abandon anything that doesn't take me there. Maybe it's not just about inspiration, or getting into the zone, but just doing it.
Great blog you've got there. Why, oh why, did all you cool kids stop using RSS? :-)
Was going to say the same thing, basically I do a variant of this when camping, adding to the list of things I missed or forgot, so that by the time I've done the first few camping trips of the season I've refreshed my memory of all the things I need. I built a list in Trello which I've been adding too but it would be handy to have a non-online way to note something which got added back to the routine once I was in connection range again.
Yes - a 6 month (or perhaps 3 before we forget?) update would be nice. I also concur that these are all personal productivity apps, based on your experience. The open question is do other people have these issues too, and can you find and market to them?
I like the idea of recurring task lists, i.e. a group of tasks that belong to a template/type of event. We do this for event planning in asana, but do it manually.
Not sure if it's just me, but the "Do Something" app icon [1] looks a bit too heavily inspired by the Apple Trailers app icon [2], with gloss removed for iOS 7 (on iOS 7 itself there is no gloss although it's there in the iTunes link), no film roll in the middle, rotated 45º, and used round rects on the corners of the ticket.
Investing that somewhere at the end of the month would definitely add up to something over a few years. (I can't figure out why everyone seems to like Chipotle so much, so I think investing might be more worthwhile)
Congrats man. Write and ship an app in one weekend is like the goal I could never reach. The closest I came is a long weekend, some hours the next week, and the weekend after that. The other time I got close was two full weeks.
It takes me too much time to get the UI (and they're never works of art anyway), screenshots, app store description, not to mention the final polish.
I was able to finish a "game" in a single night. Search the app store for "Pee in the Dark" and you'll see the final result. I ended up spending a second night releasing an update a couple weeks later for updated icon and game center.
It's a pretty terrible game but I guess you just have to pick something that you think is a "terrible idea" and just get it done. I'm sort of ashamed of my work, but to just get something completed feels good. Not everything you do is going to be on your headstone :)
I always get similar inspiration to do something.. but somehow it goes away due to lack of good environment to work in.. and lot of distractions around me..
How do you tackle distractions which potentially can fade out the inspiration to create something awesome.
"When the motivation came, I decided to squeeze every last bit of it before it vanished again." Amen to this. I think this is a critical attribute of super productive people. Good work, and thanks for the great reminders!
Agreed with all positive comments -- very inspiring and impressive! I'm planning to download Do Something & Great Words. Do you mind sharing how much time each of the apps required proportionally?
Thanks! Do Something took the longest of all of them since that had custom UI. But the other 3 I did something funny. I started with Note 22, and after I finished that, I duplicated the entire Xcode project and refactored it into Routines. It's a lot of the same code. I then duplicated that entire project and refactored into Great Words. Although the main features are different, the underlying architecture is very similar, so I was able to reuse a lot of components from all the apps.
How much time did you spend testing these apps, or what tools did you use for testing? I'm really amazed at how you were able to put four out in the open in one weekend. I usually spend quite a lot of time fixing bugs.
I'm surprised at how useful your four ideas were. Nicely done. Dumb question, but how hard was Do Something? I would figure whatever integration you would need would take a lot longer than 1/4 of a weekend.
Almost every app I've ever done has consisted of retrieving JSON data from some endpoint, parsing it, and throwing it up on a table view. So at this point, using AFNetworking, I can hook up to an API with no effort at all. That was actually the easiest part of the app. The difficult parts were the app related stuff - the transitions, loading, location services, categories, in app purchase, etc.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for making Great Words!!! I've gone through dozens of word apps and none could do this. I was about to buy a dev license to make it myself, glad you saved me the effort. :)
Would you mind sharing the data source(s) you used for the Do Something app? Curious about both what resources are out there and how easy they are to integrate.
That's a good question. Rather than promoting 4 different apps, what I really want to do is throw these 4 fishing rods in the ocean and see what bites. Once I figure out which one I think has the most potential, I really want to spend more time on it, and spend time marketing and promoting.
I like that perspective. Very different to the often propagated big-launch mantra. Can you share a bit more on what approach you took with the Spanish Bible apps? Thank you!
Great work! My favorite two apps: Great Words & Routines. 2 problems I always have and you've solved em! I only wish I could create iOS apps as fast as you haha.
Design work? There is no design work in iOS 7. The icons were all really simply. Great Words is just a "g" with single fill color, Note 22 is just three lines with a white background, Routines is pretty much just like Note 22 with a different background color, and Do Something is just basic shapes.
I beg to differ. There is always design work, you made design choices and even if they were careless choices you always have a final work that might be great or just poorly designed.
PS: I'm a little bothered by how you used "transgendered" in reference to UI design. Some people might find it insulting.