shopHere @shophere-app-blog - Tumblr Blog

Just less than 5 hours of work down to 5 minutes and 20 seconds of video. At least the background music makes it seem kind of epic.

#progress

... and because I can’t leave well enough alone, I kept tweaking the icon idea. I do like it better now though.

#gotobed

So, done for the night. I’ll try putting up the sped up screencast. Everything went pretty well. I have an app that serves as a list with the ability to add new items, swipe to complete or remove, long press to reorder, and it’s even starting to look alright.

Ran into a couple small issues. Putting text fields in the table view cells caused the long-press-to-reorder to stop working. Tried having the text fields ignore the long press, but it was easier (and better) to just disable user interactions on the text fields until their respective cell was selected. Then the text field is activated as the keyboard pops up. When editing is done, the text field is disabled again.

When I tried the app on my device, I had some trouble with the separator lines disappearing. I’ve seen this before, and it looks like a common problem. My solution was to just put a small line at the bottom of the cells. It’s kind of a hack, but it works. I also kind of like the look of not having the blank cells at the bottom of the list.

Also had to do a little bit of work to figure out how to stop the keyboard from covering the cells. There’s a lot of information online, so it wasn’t too bad, but it took a little bit of extra looking to deal with third party keyboards and changing keyboard heights.

All in all, very successful night.

#timeforbed

Just spent far too long continually tweaking an icon that doesn’t really matter anyway...

#goingwell

After a quick look, it seems that Parse has a local datastore that makes Core Data redundant for this type of app. So, I’ll go without it for now.

#decisionsdecisionsdecisions

So, starting a new Xcode project, going with a one page app, since that’s what I’ll be starting with anyway. However, it asks right away about using Core Data. Having not used Parse before, I’m not entirely sure if I need it or not, but I’ll do some checking quick before moving on.

#alwaysmorequestionsthananswers

Eh, not my favorite, but it will suffice for now. I still like the idea, but the icon in the center seems like it should be much thicker. Might look for some different icons at some point.

#doneisbetterthanperfect

And as a logical first step in the development of an app, the icon. Yeah, that’s probably something that should wait until the end, and I’m sure that I’ll change it several times before then, but it’s nice getting an app I’m working on to look like a real app. An icon makes it feel more real (in my head at least).

Also, I have a pretty good idea of what the basics of the icon will be, and I can do a preliminary version pretty easily with nothing more than an icon font and a couple minutes in Inkscape (think Illustrator for people who don’t want to pay for Illustrator).

#priorities

Alright, so here really goes nothing. I’m going to try screen recording all the work that I do tonight. Then I’ll try to speed it up and post it. I’ll be shocked if anyone watches it, but oh well.

#mostboringstreamever

I think that’s about it for tonight. This will be just a nights and weekends type thing, so don’t hold your breath waiting for new posts.

Next step will be to get a start on the app itself. I’m thinking of using SBGestureTableView for the primary component of the list and DBMapSelectorViewController for the location selection. Hopefully using these open source components will make the development process go smoothly (at least relatively).

#technicaldetails

I recorded myself doing some brainstorming on features both for the initial launch, as well as future features for both the free and premium side of things.

I also sketched out some potential layout ideas and data model. I might have to adjust this a little once I get into the Parse side of things.

#video

For now, I’m just trying to get out a Minimum Viable Product. For this is will consist of one list, one location, no sharing.

As of now, I’m going to try to include syncing since it will make the eventual sharing part a lot easier if the data model is set up for it from the beginning (I hope).

I’m going to try Parse for the backend. I haven’t used it before, so it’ll provide a nice challenge, but it seems like there’s a lot of information about it already out there. I’d rather not have a clunky login process, so I’ll have to do some thinking as to how I’ll get around it.

#MVP

So, a little background first. Pretty regularly, I’ll stop at a grocery store on the way home from work. My wife and I use an app called Avocado to store a shared grocery list so that we can both add items and check them off. It works alright.

Except, every time I go in the store, I’m constantly unlocking the phone and going into the app to see what else is on the list.

The goal of shopHere will be to bring that information directly to your lock screen as soon as you’re at the store. I’m hoping to do this using geolocation. Each list will have locations associated with it. When you arrive at that location, all your items will show up on the lock screen so you can easily see what you need and mark them off as you go.

#background

Trying something new

Hi there. My name is Travis Zehren. I run a small app company called Kickstand Apps. I’ve been running through an idea for a new app, and I decided that (for now at least) I would try blogging the entire process. I’ll try to post updates as far as what I’m doing, what problems have come up, and even a couple videos of the work I’m doing (sped up greatly of course).

I really don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone else or not, but if you want a look into the process of making an app, you might just enjoy yourself.

#heregoesnothing

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