Category Archives: Mobile App Development

Don’t Throw Away Things That Are Still Useful

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This has to do with my personal life as much as it does programming. While writing a program we often go through many iterations of what we are creating or how to solve individual issues. While, many of these ideas won’t be used in the final program, it is still worth keeping some record of them.

A couple of ways to do this are to use a notebook to work through your ideas. As you change your ideas or come up with new ideas, simply turn the page and start again. This will allow you to keep your old ideas (ideally with dates written by them), while you explore new ideas or solutions. When the notebook is full simply put it on the shelf and start another. Notebooks don’t take up much space and the are relatively cheap to purchase.

I couldn’t begin to list the times that I have run across old notes and they inspired a solution to a new problem that I was having. The same can be true for you. It just takes a bit of a change in how you do things.

Project Pricing – A Popular App of Mine to Price Projects.

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One of my most popular apps right now is Project Pricing. This is an app that I wrote because I needed an easier way to figure out how to price items that I was selling on Etsy. This was my solution.

The app solves some common issues that people have when they price their own items – such as including enough to pay themselves. The simple layout lists several fields that allow the user to enter their own numbers. It also allows you to decide if you want to calculate how long it took to make the item in minutes, or hours.

It then allows you to play with the margins you want to make and lets you quickly see how that affects the overall price of the item. Since I personally use Etsy to sell items, it included an option to include Etsy fees in the cost.

This app is as educational to explaining pricing downfalls as it is useful to those that understand how to price their items.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/project-pricing/id1014738560

A Feature For One of My Apps – Time Clock Helper.

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Since I brought up the idea of marketing yesterday, I thought I would show a bit about one of my apps.

This is my Time Clock Helper app that I wrote years ago to help myself quickly calculate the hours I was working each day. It was based on the older style paper punch cards with four punches for each day.

The original version of the app made the user type in their hours in 24 hour time. This was met some backlash, so I added a way for the user to enter their punches using a scroll wheel. The scroll wheel would use whatever time representation the user already had set up in their device – for the most part 12 hour time. This seemed to fix most of those issues, and didn’t hurt the purpose of the app at all. So, in all it was a successful change.

Thousands of copies of this app have been sold and it is used by hundreds of people a day as far as I can tell from Apple’s information.

This app can also track multiple days – simply press the “Add to Total” button and it will be added to the list of saved days and included in the total number of hours worked. You can view all of the saved days, along with the date they represent. If you need to change the dates, you can easily from the list. Also, you can email the list of days along with the total hours worked to anyone that you want.

At one point I had a request for the app to handle businesses that round their hour calculations either by 6 or 15 minute intervals. It wasn’t overly tricky to add the option, so the app fully supports those systems, too.

Click to bring up the Apple App Store

  • An image of my app as it is currently displayed in the app store.
  • Another view of Time Clock Helper, but this time showing off dark mode.