Making My First Application

Over the past few weeks I have been going back and forth on what I want my first application to be. I have a number of different ideas floating around in my head. While I have a couple of ideas that have potential to earn some income in the future, almost all of them are new takes on old ideas. I have also been struggling with what I want this blog to be. I want to share my journey, but how do I do that without opening up about the things I am working on and learning, and how can I do that without sharing details about the projects I am working on?

The bottom line is that I can’t. I can either be focused on building my applications and trying to monetize them, or I can share details on this blog and potentially get beat to market by somebody with more experience. I’ve decided that I’m more interested in the long term gain of learning Swift and SwiftUI than I am about the couple of dollars I might lose because somebody steals my ideas.

To that end, I’m going to start sharing details of my first project, a habits app. I know that there are a ton of different apps out there, but none of them work the way that I want them to. Specifically, I want something where I can create routines (or habit stacks) for all the things that I need to complete in the morning, before I go to bed, or any other random time I chose. For years I have been tracking a lot of these things in my task manager. The drawback is that it doesn’t really give me any metrics of whether I actually did the thing or if I just checked it off because I needed it out of my task manager.

For example, every Sunday I sit down and go through my weekly planning routine. That routine consists of the following tasks:

1. Review my Life Plan
2. Review my Quarterly Plan
3. Review my Email Followup
4. Review my Calendar
5. Review my Trigger List
6. Review my Task List
7. Review my Budget

Right now I list them as sub-tasks in my Weekly Planning task in my task manager. While it helps me not to forget to do them, I don’t have a good way to know if I actually did it or not. How many times have I checked off my Life plan without actually reviewing it?

So that is the basics of what I want my new application to solve for me. I am going to try and use this site to track my progress, hold myself accountable, and learn how to write good clean Swift Code.

Let the journey begin.