Brainstorming ideas for your final app (A.K.A stealing as many great designs as I ever possibly can from the app store w/o being caught)
As an Ninja! Yeaaaaah!!!
Right after the first project, Udacity asks us to brainstorm the idea for our final app. And above is my reaction when I first saw the title of the section.
Seriously though, it is actually quite difficult to have an idea about what you are going to built at the end of this journey. When you are presented when existing apps you will mostly be like, “Oh that was easy, I can do it too!” But if you want to start from scratch and come up with the second Tweetbot or something equivalent, then it’s a totally different story.
Luckily enough, I don’t have a mindset to be the second of anything. But I do have a pack of friends who spend 48 hours a day on their iPhones. And they are always unsatisfied with at least one of their apps, no matter how great the design.
Just like me.
Here’s a list of all the ideas I’ve gathered from myself, my friends, other iOS dev courses, and the great great Internet:
- An event logging app: take a picture with notes(event, time, people, etc.) anytime you want, and the app will create a timeline for you.
This idea comes from one of my friends who is also learning to be an app developer, and this is his side project. It’s basically a note app, but I think the critical part is the timeline: the key is how to make it beautiful as pro made yet easy to use as for idiot.
2. A super basic twitter/weibo client
I admit, 60% of my iPhone time, I spend on Twitter/Weibo (a.k.a the Twitter made in China). It’s the major source for my daily reading. But none of the existing clients for these two that are perfectly fit for my needs. I am not saying that none of them are good, in fact, Tweetbot is probably one of the most sophisticated and beautifully crafted apps on my iPhone, and its counterpart for Weibo, Moke, is almost equally excellent. But after being a heavy user of both apps for such a long time, I still feel like I’m walking in the mud sometimes. That’s why I consider building one for myself. Who knows? Maybe there is someone else who has exactly the same needs I do.
3. An article reader app for Wechat.
As I said, I devoted 60% of my iPhone time to those two black holes above, and the other 40% is consumed by Wechat. This percentage is rising very quickly since Wechat introduced public accounts and more media outlets have started publishing articles there. Despite its success as an instant messenger, Wechat’s design for reading long articles is terrible. First of all, you can’t pre-download articles. You have to wait for the embedded website to load every time you open an article; good luck if you are on the train. And also it suffers from a poorly designed menu structure. The user must go through countless levels between the reader and chat interface. There is practically no easy way to “save for later” or share to other popular social media outside Wechat’s own platform… Beside all of those issues, being interrupted by incoming messages while reading is such a bad experience.
Unsurprisingly, a stand-alone reader app has been one of the most wanted features. But since its maker, Tencent, is famous for its ambition to integrate everything into one app, I highly doubt that this feature will ever be developed. Developing a third party reader app would be hard, too, due to the fact that Tencent is also well-known for its reluctance to release any useful APIs for the core functions.
4. A camcorder/GPS for driving.
This idea came from another friend who is t̶o̶o̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ ̶a̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶g̶r̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶G̶P̶S sick of using his phone as a GPS and wanting a dash cam at the same time. His idea is to use the camera as the dash cam, and integrate the interface with a GPS app like Google Map (Sorry Apple). Brilliant idea I would say, but given the fact I haven’t heard of anything even remotely like that on the market yet, it must be REALLY hard to do and I am NOT referring solely to the techie part.
5. OK here comes a weird one: take pictures of the dishes you are eating, and use the app to send/sync them to your social networks around midnight.
It might sound so weird to most people who are not Chinese (so weird that it doesn’t have a name), but if you ever want to commit a serious crime to someone in the middle of the night just because he or she sent you a picture of that unbelievably delicious jaw-dropping dinner, you will understand why I want this. (Might not be able to implement due to API limitation, though.)
6. An app to keep track of credit card benefits
Admit it: we all have too many credit cards. The pro: maximizing the benefits. Some of them offer great cash back rate on certain purchase, some of them offers excellent loyalty program for travel and hotel staying. The con: it is IMPOSSIBLE to remember which offers what, and those players who keep changing the program every 3 months only make matters worse.
Yeah Discover and Freedom, I am talking about you.
Anyway, it would be great to have a handy helper who can keep all the information, even better if it can refresh the data automatically from the card issuer’s website.
7. Others
These are some of the most common “entry level” practice apps that I believe every app developer has ever made one.
- A tip calculator
- A to-do list
- A note taking app/diary
- A pomodoro clock
That’s it for now. I will update this list if I come across any other great ideas. Clearly most of them will never become reality either because it is too hard for a learner or it’s simply not a one-man job. But hey, at least I tried.
If you have an idea about a great app, please do tell me.
But there is no promise that I will develop it. :)
PS: WTF, don’t have a strike out format? Well, I get it Medium, you like it to be serious. Here’s to all the others like me who can’t write in formal prose:
- Chinese version here:
