GiftIdea! 1.1.0

After shipping GiftIdea! on the Play Store last week, we were excited. For good reason too; without any prompting, we've received three 5-star reviews from our nine users. I'm optimistic, especially considering we're only available to about 2/3 of the Androids out there.

A number of folks asked if this would run on the iPhone or if an iPhone version is coming. There aren't currently plans for that. The idea is produce a high-quality Android app, while learning and sharing all the great lessons that I'm sure will come with it.

There are a handful of things on the table for future releases, but we're starting with two small, visible changes:

1. Recipients now show the number of active gift ideas
2. Editing an idea has different "hint" text

Under the hood there were 28 changes from the last release.

Happy Gifting!

GiftIdea! 1.0.0

Yesterday, I released a simple app called GiftIdea! to Google Play for Android 4.0+ phones. This is a lot more monumental than it might seem, because the vague goal of "releasing an app" has been on my radar for a while now.

For about five years I've had the goal of getting an app into the App Store. Originally that was for the iPhone, but for one reason or another, I never could actually get something in a final-enough state to call it released. There are always reasons not to do something, as it turns out.

I think the real problem is in viewing things as "finished." This release of GiftIdea! surely isn't everything an app could be; but it is a nice simple way to keep track of gift ideas for people, which is exactly what I was after. And while I tested it on a handful of phones, there are surely quirks that we can work out together over time.

I can't say thanks enough to +Ginger DePriest for early feedback and running through the feature set on several phones.

GiftIdea! 1.0.0 Icon

Idea: AutoZen

My dad cared about maintenance. Not just of his car, but just about every car he could keep tabs on. I'm the same way, and thinking about making a simple tool to make this easier.

A rough prototype of the 4 pages is below (or at gomockingbird). Any feedback is welcome, either in the comments or by email.

Landing Page

The landing page should answer the questions "Why?" and "How much?" as well as addressing the risk of putting data into a new service. If you can export the data right away, there is little risk of losing your work.

Home Page

I want the home page to give me an idea of what should be coming up, and easily let me record what I've done. The fewer clicks, the better. 

The estimate of what the service will cost is based on previous data. In my experience "How much is it?" is always the first question someone has about oil changes, and it's helpful to be able to know this right away.

Cars

Just a simple place to see the history of each car. It should be easy to print off a copy when trading-in or selling to private party. Detailed auto records often fetch much higher prices for used cars, and the system can do this for us easily.

 

Add a Car

Eventually, the details of the car can pull a recommended maintenance schedule, useful for creating reminders on the home page.