As you have probably guessed if you have been following along, I have now decided on my next app: An event countdown app. The concept is simple: Choose a date in the future and the app starts counting down - displaying an up to the second accurate time until that event occurs. Very simple and straight forward, so you would think there wouldn't be too many of these apps out there: wrong!
I found literally a dozen apps that use this simple premise, and they all work pretty much the same way. As with any new project it is a bad idea to just copy what someone else has done, so I needed a way to stand out from the rest of the apps. After a little bit of brainstorming and looking at the comments on some of the existing apps, I settled on the following additions:
- Add the number of remaining days until the key event as the badge number on the app icon. This allows for an at-a-glance update on your most important event.
- Unlimited number of events. Strange but true, most of the free apps have a limit on the number of events you can add.
- Ability to not count weekends. This is not something I would have thought people would want, but it seems to be in demand.
- Parallax scrolling effect for background images. I'm going to be 'borrowing' this effect from the Yahoo! Weather app, simply because I think it is really cool.
As for a title, the current draft name is 'Awesome Countdown'. Like I said, it's a draft and I'm open to suggestions. If you have a better suggestion for the name of the app and I like it, I'll give you full credit in the app description.
The next steps are going to be simply defining the Core Data structures that will be used in the app. My intention is to sell pre-packaged theme packs via in-app purchase, so I need to define what each of those will need from an object structure perspective. I'm also going to build this entire app using test driven development. I've been struggling for a while to make the shift to a pure TDD methodology, and I intend to use this project to get me there.