Time Off (App Icon)

The feedback from my last post has been GREAT this week. A lot of people have expressed their excitement for me and their interest in trying/buying my app. But in the process I’ve realized that I hardly mentioned what my app does, so allow me to explain…

The app is called Time Off, it has been approved by Apple, but it wont be for sale until February.  Here’s how I plan to describe it in the app store:

The BEST Time Off tracker in the app store!

This handy app is the easiest way to keep track of how much paid time off you get from your employer, and how you’ve used it!

Time Off not only has a robust feature set, it also has the most polished and intuitive interface so you can get in, update your time, and move on with life.

Enjoy conveniences like:

MULTIPLE JOBS: Share the app with your friend or spouse because Time Off can easily track multiple jobs.

HOURS OR DAYS: Record time as hours or days, whichever you prefer!

5 CUSTOM LEAVE TYPES: Enter up to 5 different types of paid leave. Customize the names and colors however you like!

OVERVIEW: Get a birds-eye view of the year on one simple Overview screen. Each leave type can be color-coded and ordered to your preference.

CATEGORIES: Time Off automatically organizes your time into categories such as Pending, Currently Using, Reserved, Used, and Denied Requests.

EMAIL REQUESTS: Email Time Off requests directly to your supervisor and CC yourself.

ROLLOVER: Whether your time rolls over from year-to-year or you “use or lose” it, Time Off has got you covered.

RETINA SUPPORT: iPhone 4 users will enjoy crisp, high-resolution graphics that make full use of the beautiful Retina Display.

Here are the screenshots that I have for now:

Time Off Overview Screen

Instances of Time Off

Taking/Requesting Time Off

Up to 5 Custom Leave Types

Customizing Vacation Settings

Multiple Jobs

iPhone Sketchbook

Having a well-designed app is a must if you plan to stand out and get noticed. If you’re not experienced as a designer then I recommend you budget something to contract with one. Doesn’t have to be a company, there are a lot of capable freelancers out there.

A good place to start is to do some rough pencil and paper mockups yourself. Plan out how the app will look and how the user experience will flow. Try to keep things simple. You don’t have to be good at drawing, just get the rough idea on paper.  I like using the Apress iPhone Sketchbook and while I don’t have the iPhone Stencil, but that looks like it might be helpful as well.  Otherwise just make due with a napkin or something : )

OmniGraffle

If you want to be a bit fancier you could use something like Omnigraphle or Balsamiq Mockups. These will help you do more detailed wireframing.  If you have photoshop, you can find templates with lots of nice ui elements to work with, and that’s what I prefer.

Whether you hire someone or bootstrap it yourself, it will still be helpful to have done this prototyping because you’ll have a plan and you’ll know exactly what to build and how to build it. You’ll spend less time coding and recoding UIKit stuff, and trust me, that’s a good thing.

Teehan+Lax iPhone 4 GUI

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your appventure! God bless everyone!

Ahhhhhhhh!

It’s Christmas time, so I’m sure you’re all planning to watch the beloved family classic “Home Alone” at some point soon if you haven’t already.  There’s one particular line that I’ve always loved from that movie. It’s the part when Kevin runs away from the old man who shovels snow, and one day he finally realizes he’s being silly, so he goes outside and faces his fear, saying “Hey, I’m not afraid anymore. Do you hear me? I’m not afraid anymore!”. Then the old guy walks up to him and of course he tears into the house screaming.  Every time I realize that I’m afraid of something I think of that scene, and laugh to myself. It could be a spider in the garage or something, and I’ll just start saying “Do you hear me, I’m not afraid anymore!”.  Haha!

Being afraid of stuff is just stupid, so find the source and put a stop to it…

That’s my own advice to myself after realizing that fear of one feature in my app was taking hold of me. My lovely and patient wife helped me realize that I was afraid of this “big” feature because I hadn’t really scoped it out. I keep thinking it’s going to be this big scary nightmare feature, but hey, maybe it wont be so bad. I haven’t actually sat down and thought hard about it. I’ve realized over the years that it’s easy to become fearful when you don’t have a plan, and that goes for just about anything in life. What I need is to take a close hard look at this feature, break it down into all of its smaller less-intimidating, bite-size pieces and have a plan for each piece. I need to know how many classes the feature will affect, how many new views it will require, how long each piece will take, and when I can reasonable expect to be done. Once I have a plan, then it’s just a matter of working the plan.

So that’s my next step. Wait right there, I’ll be right back… “This is it, don’t get scared now.”

OK, wheew, I’m back now, and happy to say that I’ve spent the last 2 hours making a game plan for this feature. Boy, it really feels good to know what I’m really up against. There were moments when I caught myself over-complicating the feature, and I had to keep stepping back to decide what was really necessary. At one point I thought I would have to completely restructure my database! That was out of the question. I just had to think “simpler”. And ya know what? I really like the plan so far, so the next step is to impliment it.  It is kind of a big feature, so I think it would be best to program all the logic in one sitting. But I wont have that kind of time until the weekend. Until then, I plan to use the next couple weeknights to do some of the prep work. It’s like when you paint a bedroom or something like that, you find it takes longer to put down dropcloths, bust out the tools and tape the trim than it does to paint! So I’m going to try to do all that kind of prep-work this week and sink my teeth into the logic on Saturday.

So just a minute as I fast forward through time…

OK, wheew, that time travel stuff is rough, but here I am again. So yah, basically those first couple nights of prep were were a piece of cake, because I had a plan. Then came the the tough part. I actually had to break that down into a couple of different phases, because it turns out that this feature will impact several view controllers and require lots of new logic, most of which I’ve never attempted before. Well, I just took it one phase at a time, and at this point I’d say the feature is about 90% done. And the other 10% doesn’t really scare me because I know what to do, I just need to finish doing it.

However, in the process I came across a couple other big challenges that I wasn’t expecting. Adding this new feature was going to alter the functionality of another big feature!  I also discovered aspects of the feature that I had never considered before and this just made things more complex. I have to say things are getting kinda hairy now, but I don’t think it can be prevented. I’m coding this thing as simply as I can, but it’s doing a lot of complex things for the user. Those things are what make the app valuable, so they are must-haves as far as I’m concerned.

So while things are taking longer than I thought, at least I’m not living in fear of the big, bad feature. “Hey, do you hear me? I’m not afraid anymore!”