Who am I?

Firstly who am I? I am a self confessed user-interface addict (or as facebook would prefer ‘people-interface addict’). I’ve been doing design as a hobby on and off for about 10 years.

I’ve always had a creative streak in me and over the years I’ve used interface design as an outlet. I started when I was about 13-14 with simple paint and geocities (remember those cyan websites with yellow fonts?) and wilfully pursued the design trends over the years.

The majority of my experience is in web design, I created a wordpress theme called WP Admin, it was terrible thankfully I cant seem to find it anymore.

I have also completed a few website designs over the years but trends change and skills improve..

Since the creation of the iPhone I’ve been consistently impressed by the designs coming out of the apps I use and I’ve always had a secret passion to try and build my own product/app for a while, I’ve just never had an idea of what to build.

This is a story of how I designed my first iPhone app, from start to finish (although as they say nothing is ever ‘finished’) and possibly beyond that.

I hope you enjoy my journey.

I apologise now for any spelling mistakes etc. as this is my first medium post and the first written article I’ve done since I owned a blog called ‘Blog2Life’ which was about 6-7 years ago. This is scary.

Where Did the Idea FlashTrack for Come From?

This question is an easy one. The idea came from my brother, Daniel (an avid League of Legends gamer, currently in diamond league).

While chatting one night over a game of League of Legends (LoL), ok you got me I am also quite a fan! We were brainstorming some potential app ideas as this is an area of design I’ve been dying to get some hands on experience with.

At the same time quite possibly a last ditch attempt to try and make a product from start to finish without flaking half way through. As the chat progressed ‘out of the blue’ and amongst a flurry of mediocre ideas he spurted out..

“Why don’t you create a LoL timer app?”

On first thought the idea was exciting, “it do could this.. oh and it could do that!”. But shortly after the euphoria, reality set in. There is no way this has not been done already. There are bound to be loads of apps out there.

After a short and (unfortunately) fruitful search I found a plethora of web and mobile apps. The idea seemed almost hopeless. Then it hit me! I had recently read a book that pushed on the idea of:

Even if it exists you can do it, just do it better.

This was the ethos I used to carry the whole project through.

Lo and behold, ‘FlashTrack’ was born (but it wasn’t named FlashTrack until much later in development, instead it was called ‘LoL O’Clock’). I knew from playing the game for a considerable amount of hours that this was going to be a tall order but little did I know just how much work I was letting myself in for!

Part 2 — Coming Soon.