A home-cooked app can have hard coded values (oh yeah!), doesn't have to be pretty (although it's more fun), doesn't have to support all platforms (no, I won't add Apple Watch support!), it just has to work for me.
My latest project: a little iOS app that I can use at a bookstore to scan the book's barcode and then checks if that book is available at my local public library.
When I showed that to my SO she was amazed and said: "And you just made THAT?". Well, yes. My secret superpower is that I can make these little computers that we all keep in our pockets these days make anything I want them to.
A few other projects that I made for myself over the years:
- App that generates PDF invoices from my App Store financial reports (I simply paste in the plain text from the website)
- A break timer app (old one was 32bit-only, I didn't bother to download a new one)
- Text snippet app: it scans an email for the senders name and pre-populates possible answers. I turned this into a tiny CRM that keeps track of feature requests and whom I sent an update. This is actually in the App Store, but was a huge commercial failure, but I use this myself e v e r y day.
- Quick click: it's like a command line for my Mac. I type something I see on the screen (e.g. the title of a button), the app highlights possible matches, I press Return and the app sends a simulated mouse click. I can also use this as a window manager to resize the active app, because, why not?
For personal use:
- Portfolio simulator app that calculates every possible IRR for a given number of years (once I was done I discovered portfoliocharts.com, well...)
- Portfolio tracker app to track my retirement savings: this is like a tiny spreadsheet app only that it's fed by 3 csv files (orders.csv, transactions.csv, asses prices.csv). "editing" is done in VIM. The app generates various reports that I use to check if I'm on track with my savings.
- Simple stock checker app (fetches the prices of a, yes, hard-coded list of ticker symbols).
- App to categorize my spendings. Input is a csv file (I like plain text). I wanted to learn now Naive Bayes filtering works and have to say, seeing the app do its thing is as close to magic as I ever got.
- Time lapse screen recorder: creates a screenshot every x seconds. I used this once to record a video of how I'm developing an app.
- Custom implementation of Unshaky (with more stats and settings) to fix the double-space keypress issue of my new MacBook Air
- Alarm clock app that uses the accelerometer to wake me when I'm not in a deep sleep phase.
And a few more that I don't use anymore...