I figure I can write a bit about where my own app ideas have come from. My favorite apps have come about because I needed a tool to make my life easier. Because they were filling a need for myself, I knew what features were needed and how to access them the easiest.

The very first app that I wrote was a date app. You put in two dates and the app will tell you how many days between them. I needed to calculate how many days had passed and also what date was a certain number of days in the future. I added a few other features after that, such as counting weeks, months, years, week days and also the ability to save dates to pull up later. Most of those ideas were added because users requested them and I was able to implement them in a way that didn’t take away from the original intent. That has always been important to me – never add a feature that ruins why the app was useful in the first place.

The next few apps that I wrote were games that seemed fun to me. To some extent, they were more learning exercises than anything, but they are all still available. My favorite being a maze game using only text characters to display the map and monsters. I oddly took more work than it should have, but I’m proud of the end result. That particular app has been floating around in my head since I was a teenager (30+ years ago). I originally created it on an Apple II and at one point made a version for a VAX VMS system. It featured a primitive version of ray tracing to keep the player from seeing through walls. It also had monsters that could chase after you. Each part was written from scratch and although looking at the code now is a bit scary, the user experience was fairly clean.

I have a bunch more apps to talk about, but I will save those for tomorrow. But, the big point that I will make today and continue throughout my posts – if you can, make apps that you will enjoy. If you don’t care about what they do, then that will translate to the final product.