Week 3: An App in Four Weeks

Today marks the end of Week 3 of my App in Four Weeks challenge.

This week I chose a name. I designed an icon and overall style for the app. I then spent quite some time implementing autorotation, and getting it exactly right. There is now a passcode lock too.

By nature, I am not a perfectionist. Whenever I see that something works, I tend to lose interest in finishing it. For me, shipping things is a big deal, and hard to do. Normally, I lack the willpower to do polish and finish things. By making a very public commitment to build this app in four weeks, and by writing about it here, I can outsource my willpower: polishing and shipping becomes a lot easier. Delivering a bad app or not delivering at all would feel like a big embarrassment.

So far, the process has been a marvelous experience. I had so much help from everybody: people who have feature requests, name suggestions, design suggestions, beta testers, people who tell me that they like this blog, and so on. If you consider doing something similar, I can only recommend it. My work becomes a lot better by doing this, and people who read this hopefully learn and get inspired, a win-win situation.

Next week, I will not add any new big features, but instead polish what I have so far, set up a website and make a marketing plan. From Wednesday on I am volunteering at multi-day trail race, so I am not sure how much time I will have to work on Met.

If there is any part of the process that you would like me to write about, please let me know.