ImprompTo & Big Rocks

Mobile Makers Week 6

At the end of last week, we finished (as much as we could finish) our Instagram copies. It was a very good exercise in collaboration, using git and in working on a tight schedule using Agile.

We also all pitched our app ideas and Dennis and I already had kind of decided on one.

Our app helps friends and coworkers easily coordinate impromptu meetings at local places. It facilitates voting for places, suggesting other places, coordinates location pinging and provides directions to the selected locations. It’s a ton to do, so I hope we are able to finish it in a good way.

We actually only have about 17 working days to complete a full app that is destined for the App Store.

That is not a lot of time. Great advice from our mentor and our teachers is to keep the functionality focused. Don’t allow scope creep. Kevin, gave a great analogy about completely filling a glass beaker with big rocks first, then pebbles, then sand, then water. The idea is that, there is always alot to do; but the moral of the story is that the big rocks go first. It wouldn’t work any other way.

Today (day 2 of development), we really did a lot and I am hoping that we complete a round trip functionality to show on our demo this Thursday. One cool thing is that we got the sliding side panels to work. It is very slick looking and really is helpful as far as screen realestate.

We have a meeting with our design mentor tomorrow so I hope he helps us fine tune our app to look a bit more professional.

Finally, we met with our mentor last week and he mentioned that he was just hired as an iOS engineer at Apple in the iTunes Mobile App group. Pretty awesome. Feeling strangely proud that our mentor is such a great developer lead that Apple picked him up.

Well, back to the grind. The best is yet to come!