I did not know a single line of code until
one year ago. I got inspired by the evolution of the app in the
App Store, which they were becoming more useful, unique, and brilliant every next day.
It was my last year in high school
when I finally decided to study computer engineering at university. I
just wanted to learn more about computers and programming. Before beginning my studies, I already
had an app idea. This idea came from my family and friends. I remember that most of my f
riends,
including myself, did not use any app to plan and organize their activities. I began to think the reasons
behind this thought and concluded that most of the apps that should help you organize are not easy or
fast to use and takes time to learn. Whe
n looking for apps that are both to do lists and calendar at the
same time, I could not find many. That is when I decided to make such app that would help the user
schedule their activities in an easier, faster, and user
–
friendly way. For example, I wanted
a feature that
no other known app has, which is the ability to record the sound of the notification of the scheduled
activity. Why this is very useful? Let’s say that we are driving a car and we suddenly receive a
notification of an activity that was plan
ned for now. If you are a good driver, you would not look at the
screen of your phone while driving. This leads to the possibility of forgetting about that activity that you
had to do today. However, if you recorded the main topic of your activity, and the
notification includes
that message with your own voice, it becomes more difficult to forget about any scheduled activity.
The other main feature that was necessary for my app was the ability to add pictures to any activities.
When the time for the activit
y arrives, the picture will be included in the notification, together with a
title and description of the activity. This is something that other apps can do. However, what if we do
not have any relevant pictures in our camera roll and we do not want to tak
e a new picture now
because it takes too much time? That is the problem I tried to solve with my app. Instead of having two
options to select a picture, there is a third option called “Search”. This is a cool and simple way of
searching for a relevant pict
ure for your activity and it takes less than a second. The search feature takes
the information from the title of your activity and displays an unlimited number of pictures on the
screen. This is achieved by using a WebView inside the app that automaticall
y searches for pictures
considering, as I mentioned, the title of the activity.
The third aspect I considered when creating the app is the importance of having a good design. For this
reason, I decided to design the whole app using the SwiftUI framework, t
he latest Apple technology for
the UI of the app. I found that very few apps are currently implemented using this framework, probably
because of it is very new and people are still learning it. However, I must mention that Apple engineers
really did a good
job creating this framework that helps the developer a lot.
Another important thing to
mention is that the app is updated regularly, and I receive messages from users from within the app to
help fix certain bugs. The app is iOS exclusive, which means that
it is not available on Android because I
consider the App Store a more appropriate place to distribute such app.