4 apps, one weekend | Hacker News Reader

4 apps, one weekend

bitar.io

149 pointsmobitar59 comments

This is really inspiring, man. Great work, and good luck. I might do one of these solo hackathons myself, given all the stuff I have floating in my head that never gets to see the light of day. Sort of reminds me of http://hackalone.org - a "hackathon for introverts", which was shared on HN a while back. I normally just end up buying domain names and sitting on them, until I get a notification a year later reminding me of my failure :-) I have a tonne of ideas I get excited about every now and then, some of which I think are good, all (or most of) the knowledge and tools I need to implement them, no pressing financial constraints, and a decent amount of free time. Yet I rarely start any of them, and the ones I do start I do not finish. It's frustrating trying to understand this complete lack of motivation.

PS: I'm a little bothered by how you used "transgendered" in reference to UI design. Some people might find it insulting.

Haha same with me man. My cycle is 1. come up with an idea 2. buy a domain for said idea 3. repeat step 1

It wasn't until very recently that I made the very obvious discovery of "the only way I'll ever make it is to make it". I discovered that entrepreneurship is not about coming up with ideas, it's about bringing those ideas to life. I wrote about this epiphany here: http://bitar.io/the-entrepreneur/

PS: I'll change that word :)

Loved the second article too. A bit like the saying "Writers write." I keep looking for that point when I get lost in my work, a state of flow, and I abandon anything that doesn't take me there. Maybe it's not just about inspiration, or getting into the zone, but just doing it.

Great blog you've got there. Why, oh why, did all you cool kids stop using RSS? :-)

Sites that don't have RSS get lost for me. It's nice to have a feed.

Good point. Here's an RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/bitar/feed

As Derek Sivers points out - "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution" !! http://sivers.org/multiply

I like the thinking behind routines. Each of these apps seems to solve a problem that you had but that quite a lot of other people also likely had.

I'd love to see a follow up showing how these apps did for you.

Was going to say the same thing, basically I do a variant of this when camping, adding to the list of things I missed or forgot, so that by the time I've done the first few camping trips of the season I've refreshed my memory of all the things I need. I built a list in Trello which I've been adding too but it would be handy to have a non-online way to note something which got added back to the routine once I was in connection range again.

Will do! I hope it's something worthy of mention.

Yes - a 6 month (or perhaps 3 before we forget?) update would be nice. I also concur that these are all personal productivity apps, based on your experience. The open question is do other people have these issues too, and can you find and market to them?

Also - was the title referencing, "4 touchdowns, 1 game, Polk High"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DikpddPf79g

I like the idea of recurring task lists, i.e. a group of tasks that belong to a template/type of event. We do this for event planning in asana, but do it manually.

This is a very powerful idea - just unearthed an old post for you: http://evhead.com/2008/09/processizer.html

I wonder if anyone took that to heart and built it? Maybe ev would fund it?

Edit: guess sales force already did http://help.do.com/customer/portal/articles/490143-how-do-i-...

And asana http://blog.asana.com/2012/01/create-repeating-tasks-for-you...

Though neither is a task template

I really like the "Do Something" app - I think that one will do well. Good job! I'm aspiring to this level of productivity.

Ha thanks! Don't be fooled to think that I'm at all productive. I just got tired of wishing.

Congrats on shipping your apps! That's great.

Not sure if it's just me, but the "Do Something" app icon [1] looks a bit too heavily inspired by the Apple Trailers app icon [2], with gloss removed for iOS 7 (on iOS 7 itself there is no gloss although it's there in the iTunes link), no film roll in the middle, rotated 45º, and used round rects on the corners of the ticket.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/do-something-find-things-to/...

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/itunes-movie-trailers/id4719...

$25 a day is $600 a month.

Not exactly "measly" for mostly passive income.

Not measly at all. Bought me Chipotle every day. But in the startup world where we hear daily about multimillion dollar deals, $25 is measly.

Looks like your apps are so much more useful than a lot of the multi-million dollar apps that get sold.

Investing that somewhere at the end of the month would definitely add up to something over a few years. (I can't figure out why everyone seems to like Chipotle so much, so I think investing might be more worthwhile)

If he was living on $600/month, that is a pretty small amount.

Does depend on which country he is in.

for example: 600$ is pretty good amount of money at month in Venezuela is even more that the minimum salary.

Congrats man. Write and ship an app in one weekend is like the goal I could never reach. The closest I came is a long weekend, some hours the next week, and the weekend after that. The other time I got close was two full weeks.

It takes me too much time to get the UI (and they're never works of art anyway), screenshots, app store description, not to mention the final polish.

Ya the submission part is a pain but I just hold my breath and dive in and finish it as quick as I can.

I was able to finish a "game" in a single night. Search the app store for "Pee in the Dark" and you'll see the final result. I ended up spending a second night releasing an update a couple weeks later for updated icon and game center.

It's a pretty terrible game but I guess you just have to pick something that you think is a "terrible idea" and just get it done. I'm sort of ashamed of my work, but to just get something completed feels good. Not everything you do is going to be on your headstone :)

You'd be surprised; you don't get to write your own headstone :)

I always get similar inspiration to do something.. but somehow it goes away due to lack of good environment to work in.. and lot of distractions around me..

How do you tackle distractions which potentially can fade out the inspiration to create something awesome.

When you realize you really have no choice but to get something done, you won't let anything get in the way.

This routine app developed by someone I know is better in my opinion: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/routines/id370297791?mt=8

"When the motivation came, I decided to squeeze every last bit of it before it vanished again." Amen to this. I think this is a critical attribute of super productive people. Good work, and thanks for the great reminders!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

Agreed with all positive comments -- very inspiring and impressive! I'm planning to download Do Something & Great Words. Do you mind sharing how much time each of the apps required proportionally?

And what API do you use for Word app?

Thanks! Do Something took the longest of all of them since that had custom UI. But the other 3 I did something funny. I started with Note 22, and after I finished that, I duplicated the entire Xcode project and refactored it into Routines. It's a lot of the same code. I then duplicated that entire project and refactored into Great Words. Although the main features are different, the underlying architecture is very similar, so I was able to reuse a lot of components from all the apps.

You going to release the source code for them :) ?

How much time did you spend testing these apps, or what tools did you use for testing? I'm really amazed at how you were able to put four out in the open in one weekend. I usually spend quite a lot of time fixing bugs.

I'm surprised at how useful your four ideas were. Nicely done. Dumb question, but how hard was Do Something? I would figure whatever integration you would need would take a lot longer than 1/4 of a weekend.

Almost every app I've ever done has consisted of retrieving JSON data from some endpoint, parsing it, and throwing it up on a table view. So at this point, using AFNetworking, I can hook up to an API with no effort at all. That was actually the easiest part of the app. The difficult parts were the app related stuff - the transitions, loading, location services, categories, in app purchase, etc.

First up, Congrats. I've tried the app in a weekend thing myself, but never had enough motivation to pull through to the end. Shipping is hard!

As an iOS developer, doing this in a couple of hours is a bit crazy. It'd probably take me a day - day and a half to do.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for making Great Words!!! I've gone through dozens of word apps and none could do this. I was about to buy a dev license to make it myself, glad you saved me the effort. :)

Haha, I hope you find it useful :)

This is very cool -- thank you for sharing.

Would you mind sharing the data source(s) you used for the Do Something app? Curious about both what resources are out there and how easy they are to integrate.

Do Something uses the Foursquare API to pull out their most popular places. It was pretty easy to set up.

Cool. Thx!

Any stats so far on the apps? What are your plans for promotion?

That's a good question. Rather than promoting 4 different apps, what I really want to do is throw these 4 fishing rods in the ocean and see what bites. Once I figure out which one I think has the most potential, I really want to spend more time on it, and spend time marketing and promoting.

Agreed.

99% of profitable iOS apps do little to no promotion. Instead, they're found via search or on the top lists.

Better to try a bunch of things, as you say, and then invest your time into improving whichever is already working best.

This is exactly what I did with my Spanish Bible apps.

I like that perspective. Very different to the often propagated big-launch mantra. Can you share a bit more on what approach you took with the Spanish Bible apps? Thank you!

This was on HN some time ago: http://www.trevormckendrick.com/my-first-year-in-the-app-sto...

Great work! My favorite two apps: Great Words & Routines. 2 problems I always have and you've solved em! I only wish I could create iOS apps as fast as you haha.

Thanks! Hope you find them useful

Thanks for sharing ... Definitely inspiring. Just wondering ... how long did the design work took?

Design work? There is no design work in iOS 7. The icons were all really simply. Great Words is just a "g" with single fill color, Note 22 is just three lines with a white background, Routines is pretty much just like Note 22 with a different background color, and Do Something is just basic shapes.

I beg to differ. There is always design work, you made design choices and even if they were careless choices you always have a final work that might be great or just poorly designed.

Your perfected the art of shipping.

I have something similar to Do Something pending App Store review right now. Great execution!

Great work! Now the question is how to find a way to do this sustain-ably (:

Oh man, Do Something looks like a great idea! Good job man

Thanks, let me know if you find it useful

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