When I reached the mountain-top experience of getting Apple’s blessing to sell my app in their store I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But it’s still not for sale yet because the truth is that I still have a LOT of work ahead of me. Unfortunately, I have to admit I’m a little “burnt out” at the moment.
FundEasy.com
I think it’s only a short-term burnout, not something that will prevent me from continuing on with iOS. Thing is, I just don’t really want to work on my computer any more than I have to these days. I work a full-time job as a web developer at Ministry Sync. It’s a GREAT company and we build online event management tools for non-profits. It’s very fullfilling work, but I’ve been working on the same project for the last few months and it felt like the it was never going to end. At the same time I’ve bee working on my app for the last 6 months in my “free” time and it’s felt like that is never going to end either. Good news is that we finally released the major upgrades to the project at work! It’s a product called FundEasy, check out what’s new.
Industrial iPad App Design
On top of that project I also was designing the UI for an iPad app that I was contracted to work on. It’s been a great working experience with this client, but just one more project to keep me up at night and distract me from the iPhone stuff. But now that project is pretty much 90% wrapped up, so that’s one more weight off my shoulders.
Since my plate is clearing up a bit I’ve been taking the opportunity to rest more. I just need to be not-working for several consecutive nights, and maybe weekends, until I feel like my energy and motivation have been restored.
So you might be asking yourself, “ok, so you’re resting up a bit, but what’s left to do on the app”? Well, a couple weeks ago I realized that the last big feature that I want to add might be harder than I thought. In fact, I might have to change my data model and re-program some stuff to make that happen. The feature is “reporting” your past time off. At minimum I want you to be able to email yourself a plain text report, but at best I’d like to have an .xls attachment with a nicely formatted report. I think it’s a really important feature because my app shows you the current fiscal year on screen, so if you wanted to see data from a previous year you would have to use this reporting feature. So it’s a must-have as far as I can tell.
I also realized that I’m still afraid of a couple things. If you remember I did a post a while back called “I’m Not Afraid Anymore“, go check it out and come right back… If I’m honest, I’m still a bit afraid of Core Data. I’ve been working with it in my app a LOT, but there are still some things about it that feel like black magic. My biggest fear about a premature launch is that I’ll put my app out there and soon after I’ll discover that I need to make a change to the data model. Creating a second model and migrating the data scares me. But I know that I don’t need to be scared, I just need to learn more. If I’m more educated, and if I practice a data migration then I’ll be more self-assured and that’s a better place to be in when I launch. If I’m afraid something might happen, then I should plan that it will and just get prepared.
Baby Almost On Board!
One other major thing going on in my life is that my wife is just a few weeks away from giving birth to our second child, which we’re very excited about. I’ve been trying to race the clock and get this app done before the baby arrives, but I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that it probably wont happen. I could try to work my butt off and release the app next week, but then I would risk making mistakes under pressure and not have any fun with it. I also don’t want to worry about supporting my customers and my newborn at the same time!
So there you have it. I’m a busy, tired, perfectionist with a baby on the way… so I need more time. I’ve come so far, I just have a little bit more to go. I can do it, but there’s really no hurry. For now it’s been nice to take some extra “time off” 
Good night, God bless ya!
It’s a shame that Apple doesn’t allow ‘trials’ and they don’t provide any mechanism for it.
In the meantime I’d be happy to issue some promo codes to anyone who’s interested in testing the current build of my app! Just let me know via the blog, twitter or email if you’d like to try it out!
Where Have I Been?!
Baby Joy!
Hey everyone, wow, happy March already! I just realized it’s been a full month since my last blog post! Man, time is seriously flying these days. So where have I been? Well, the day after my last post I became a daddy…again. My lovely wife delivered our second child, Joy Marie Ruth, and things have been very ‘full’ ever since. She’s a wonderful little girl and I love spending time with her.
I took a full week off from my day job and also took a couple weeks off from working on all of my side projects. I think I went a couple weeks without so much as a tweet, and it was NICE : )
Since then I’ve done a lot of work on Time Off, I’ve attended CocoaHeads and I’ve even created a second fully-functional app! Stay tuned this week for information about all of these developments!