App as a gift
My girlfriend turned 27 last week. Since it’s our very first birthday celebrations together, I decided to make an extra effort when picking a birthday gift for her. I had one month to think about the best gift ever, and that’s how I came up with App As A Gift.
Usually, when I pick a gift, I prefer to give an experience. Experience lasts longer than any object — and sometimes even forever. My girlfriend and I are both software engineers; we love using and building software for the web, so it took me a while, and then it hit me! Why not build a web application, only for her personal use? I started thinking about it more seriously, and then I recalled that she was always reminding me to send her our mutual photos. Finally, I decided on building a map that holds all of our photos together, pinned to the location where they were taken. This way, she can recall our best times, through mobile and desktop platforms, anytime!
I started building it on evenings and weekends. I also used it for mastering React and Redux (which are great technologies, by the way). It took me about 3 weeks to complete the first working version, and 1 more week for final tweaks and bug fixes. Eventually, I deployed it to Heroku and uploaded a few photos of us. I have decided to make it open source, so anyone with basic programming knowledge will be able to use it as a gift. You can get the source code here: https://github.com/tomericco/Phlotter
The day of her birthday arrived. I took her for dinner in a fancy restaurant in Tel Aviv. Right after the material gift (you can’t make it without it), I showed her the app on my phone. She was thrilled and couldn’t be more surprised. She told me that it’s the first time she’s received this kind of gift. The message here is that an app (even simple and small such as Phlotter) can be a great gift, combining both material and mental experience.
How do you create your App As A Gift?
Here is my suggested route for building your own App As A Gift for your loved ones:
- Think about what piece of software they really need. What can be automated or computerized, in order to make their lives more enjoyable.
- Customize the app for their needs. Make sure the app is designed for them as first-class citizens. Do they use it from their mobile? Make it in a mobile-first design. Do they have big, chubby fingers? Use big, fat buttons. Decorate the app with their name and their favorite emojis or photos.
- Plan your time well, and be ready on time. You don’t want to spend weeks on it and then miss a birthday with nothing in your hands — or, even worse, a buggy app.
- Deploy it to the open web and get a domain. Use Heroku or any other cloud service to deploy your app to the wide-open web. It’s better to buy a nice domain, for example: http://www.michaelandsarah.com or http://www.tommysweather.com.
- Protect your data. Last but not least, App As A Gift will probably sometimes hold sensitive and personal information. Use any kind of authentication. It can be a hardcoded password, or even login with Facebook or Google (access is limited only to you and the app receiver account).
BTW, you are welcome to clone Phlotter’s repository (https://github.com/tomericco/Phlotter) and customize it for your own gift (or any other use). It’s even ready for deployment on Heroku! I would be happy also for your contribution. By adding more storage integrations, we all could share memories with loved ones, privately and securely.
Tomer
